Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Since America’s infancy, farmers and gardeners have depended on farmer’s almanacs to give them information they believed was important, not just for planting and harvesting, but also for taking care of other necessary chores around the farm and home. Now, for all you city folk who have never had the pleasure of thumbing through the pages of an almanac on a cold winter’s day, let me tell you a little bit about them.

Almanacs are publications distributed annually containing important information, often monthly summaries of when to plant and when to harvest based upon complicated astrological and astronomical calculations that include such things as the phases of the moon and the alignment of the planets. This information is also helpful to the reader in other ways. For instance, these “signs,” as they are called, will tell you the best days to get teeth pulled, burn brush, and render lard. The old timers swore by the almanac and its homely prescriptions.

For years, pharmacies and feed and seed stores offered free almanacs to their customers as promotion and advertising tools. My grandfather never missed picking up a copy of “The Lady’s Birthday Almanac” from B&B Pharmacy up in West Asheville. For me, it’s hard to beat Blum’s Farmer’s and Planter’s Almanac, which has been published every year since 1828 in Winston Salem, NC. I have a three-year subscription to Blum’s. I’m not a stickler for planting according to the signs, which may explain my less-than-stellar harvests! I have friends, though, who swear by it. They trust the Zodiac more than they trust their County Agent!

In American history, there have been several almanacs that have been of great historical significance. From 1732 to 1758, Benjamin Franklin produced his famous Poor Richard’s Almanac in Philadelphia. Franklin’s almanac contained everything an almanac should. It had its calendar of planting times and weather predictions, but it also had much more. Franklin, writing under the pen name Richard Saunders, included a few now famous proverbs and unforgettable sayings such as, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” A lot of people in colonial America purchased Poor Richard’s for its wise words and humorous stories. Then there was The Crockett Almanac, published in Nashville, Tennessee and centered around the life of the so-called King of the Wild Frontier, Davy Crockett. The first Crockett Almanac was published in 1835, just a year before the Coonskin Congressman’s untimely death at the Alamo, and it continued to be published well into the 1850s. Again, this historic publication included everything an almanac needed to include, along with legendary tales about the far-famed frontiersman. Much of the Crockett legend was first woven together in the Crockett Almanacs.

Today, the number of almanacs annually produced has dwindled down to just a handful. Other than Blum’s, the most noteworthy of the modern almanacs is The Farmer’s Almanac, published since 1818 and based in Lewiston, Maine.

So, the next time you need to know the gestation period for any farm animal, or the average date of the last frost, or the best day to plant your pumpkins, pick up an almanac. You’ll learn something new and have fun in the process!