get yellow as gold and the berries are red,

get yellow as gold and the berries are red, just as red as can be.”

“THE TOPS might die out for two to three years. You can dig up every stalk you see. Then go back next year, you’re liable to go out and find three times as much as you did before,” Burnam Atkins said.

Baldwin agreed. Already this year, the Cave Brothers have brought him three loads—one of nine pounds, one of five pounds and one of seven pounds—from a patch where they only found five pounds all last year, he said.

Cattle and deer graze the tops down. They just love the tops,” Burnam Atkins said. “Got to be good forage or they wouldn’t eat it,” T. R. Baldwin observed.

“Sometimes you’ll find it growing on these flat rocks,” Atkins said. “Then it’s no trouble at all to pull it up. And they’re some good roots growing on the rocks too.”

Baldwin said he usually carries a long screwdriver for ginseng hunting. He grabs the plant by the top and pries out the root. “I just take me a stick and sharpen the end,” Atkins said. “I can use that same stick to reach out and get the snakes.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a rattlesnake rattle. “I was hunting ginseng the other day when I ran into this. I quit for the day, or 1 would have got more.”

T. R. BALDWIN said his daddy used to use a file for ginseng hunting. “That’s what they used to use,” he said. His daddy, like a lot of the old timers, used to carry a hunk of ginseng in his pocket to pull out and chew, Baldwin said.

Baldwin said his daddy also had a cultivated ginseng patch, “it covered more than an acre.” T. R. Baldwin has his own patch, up on the mountain, “but the weeds are over it so bad it wouldn’t make a good picture.”

Burnam Atkins boarded off a small corner of his hog lot, under an apple tree, and planted ginseng three years ago. He’s pleased with how the patch is coming a