Yesterday afternoon I paid a visit to a certain wooded lot where I had hunted ginseng back in my younger days, and just as I had suspected the berries that grow atop those beautiful ‘seng plants glowed hot-iron red in the filtered sunlight near the forest floor. Mid to late August is when ‘seng berries usually begin to turn from the dull green of summer to the bright scarlet of fall, the age-old sign that it was finally time to dig those precious roots o’ gold!
Much of my time during the autumns of my childhood and teenage years was spent in the woods of rural southwestern Virginia, scouring the hillsides and hollers for mature ginseng plants. Many an evening I would return home with the pockets of my cargo-style pants stuffed full of ginseng roots, fresh from the harvest and ready to be cleaned, dried and sold. Back then a pound of dried ‘seng roots brought anywhere from $150 to $200 on the open market, and it didn’t take a whole lot of them for a youngster like me to buy a new set of school clothes and other essentials (like a new baseball glove).
There is nothing quite like the solitude of the deep woods to clear one’s head and set a dream in motion. And after a long, hot afternoon spent walking along ridgelines and negotiating streambeds while looking for those ever-elusive ‘seng plants, it always felt like heaven sitting on the front porch under the moonlight, admiring the day’s harvest that lay spread out in front of me on an old newspaper.
I never got rich from ‘seng huntin’, but it taught me to appreciate nature and the wonderful Creator who gave it to us humans to use for our joy and benefit. Those wonderful roots ‘o gold helped finance my formal education, but the time spent searching for them taught me a lot about life and the world in which we all live. Those were good times, and for just a few minutes yesterday afternoon they were mine once more.
For more information on ginseng, please visit my site www.Grow-Ginseng.com.