Shine on, shine on harvest moon, up in the sky …

Can you believe summer has already come and gone?

The final death knell comes Tuesday, but the signs have been showing for weeks now. Shadows are longer. The days feel shorter. The plants and trees around my house are starting to take on that fall twinge of color, just the beginning of what’s coming in the next six weeks.

This week on the Train, we debunk the myth and explore the legend of the lowly kudzu vine, a Southern scourge for decades. The Harvest Moon is approaching, and appropriately, a movie called Shine On Harvest Moon debuted in 1944.

If Ann Sheridan was in it, it must have been good.

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- Wayne K.

You know the picture.

You've driven past it a thousand times. Somewhere south of here, off the interstate, a barn gone under. A stand of trees turned into green furniture. Telephone poles wearing sweaters.

The vine that ate the South.

Except it didn't.

Not even close.

The U.S. Forest Service, which actually goes out and counts things, puts kudzu on about 227,000 acres of southern forestland. The South has roughly 200 million acres of forest. Run that division and you get about one-tenth of one percent.

One-tenth of one percent.

That's an area about the size of a small county. Meanwhile Asian privet — a shrub nobody has ever written a song about — is sitting on 3.2 million acres. Invasive roses cover more than three times what kudzu does. Nobody's making a horror movie about roses.

The nine-million-acre figure you've heard your whole life, the one that shows up in newspapers and government reports and every travel piece ever written about the Deep South? Writer Bill Finch went looking for where it came from. He traced it back to a garden club newsletter.

A garden club newsletter.

For years I heard the story. I never once checked it. Nobody did. You don't fact-check a thing everybody already knows.

Here's what makes it worse. We planted it.

Kudzu showed up at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, a Japanese garden exhibit, all that broad green leaf and grape-smelling bloom. Folks liked it. It came south by way of the New Orleans Exposition in the mid-1880s and got sold as a porch vine. Shade for a nickel. Your great-grandmother may have paid money for it.

Then came the dust and the gullies.

In 1935 the brand-new Soil Conservation Service went looking for something that would hold dirt on a hillside, and kudzu raised its hand. Government nurseries grew a hundred million seedlings between 1935 and 1942. The CCC boys planted them. The government paid farmers as much as eight dollars an acre to put it in the ground.

And then there was Channing Cope.

Cope wrote a farm column for the Atlanta Constitution and preached kudzu on the radio like a man with a tent and a collection plate. He grew it on his Yellow River place southeast of Atlanta. He founded the Kudzu Club of America, got twenty thousand members signed up, and set a goal of eight million acres.

He never got there. By 1945, after ten years of federal money and a radio evangelist, the South had somewhere between half a million and a million acres of the stuff, depending on who did the counting.

Then everybody quietly changed their minds. USDA pulled kudzu off its list of suggested cover plants in 1953. Called it a weed in 1970. Put it on the federal noxious weed list in 1997.

Same agency. Same plant. Forty years and a complete reversal, and not one apology.

So why does it look like the apocalypse out your windshield?

Because kudzu is a sun plant. It wants edges. Roadsides, fence lines, cut banks, the sunny rim of a woodlot, the lot behind the Arby's. It does poorly in the shade of a real forest — it climbs the outside of the woods like a man who can't get in the door.

Which means it grows in precisely the places you look at.

It's a roadside plant with a publicist.

Every mile you drive, you're looking at the narrow strip of ground kudzu is good at, and your brain files it as the whole country. Meanwhile the privet and the honeysuckle and the autumn olive are back in the timber doing the actual damage, out of sight, and nobody has ever slowed down to take a picture.

Now, before anybody writes me a letter.

I'm not saying the stuff is a houseplant. Where it's established it will smother what's under it, and it's a nitrogen-fixer, which sounds friendly but means it sours the soil chemistry and kicks up enough nitrogen oxide to nudge ground-level ozone. It's ugly to kill. Mowing doesn't do it. Fire doesn't do it.

The tuber sits three feet down like a sweet potato with a grudge and sends up another season whenever it feels like it. University of Kentucky's foresters say goats and cattle will wear it out if you keep after them, and herbicide works if you're willing to come back for several years running.

Kentucky's after it right now. The Transportation Cabinet sprays it. A task force in Frankfort is working a patch along KY 676 where you can watch the progress from the road. They started testing spray drones in the fall of 2025. As of this past July, the whole eastern Kentucky effort had treated just under a hundred acres.

A hundred acres.

That's the scale of the monster that was going to eat the South.

And right here in Berea, a college student named Senna Jenkins spent a senior-year capstone trying to cook kudzu starch down into ethanol — malted barley, yeast, same idea as corn liquor — hoping the stuff you pull out of the ground might pay for pulling it out of the ground.

Which is about the most Kentucky solution to a problem I've ever heard.

I think the reason we love this lie is that it's the only story about the South where the South is the victim of something that came from somewhere else. A foreign vine. An outside invader. Not us. Not our doing.

But it was our doing. We bought it for the porch. We got paid to plant it. We put a man on the radio to talk it up.

Then it grew, like we asked it to, and we spent the next seventy years telling the world it snuck up on us.

The vine isn't the liar here.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Stop #155 on this tour doesn't have a mountain in sight.

It's got red dirt, pine breaks, and a courthouse square in Ripley, Mississippi, where a man got shot dead the night before he was supposed to win an election.

We'll get to that.

Tippah County sits up against the Tennessee line in the hill country of northeast Mississippi, one of the westernmost counties the Appalachian Regional Commission counts as part of the range (arc.gov).

No coal seams here. No switchbacks. Just 460 square miles of rolling farmland the Chickasaw Nation signed away at the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek in 1832, and that the Mississippi legislature carved into a county four years later, in 1836.

The name is Chickasaw for "cut off," named for the river that splits the county down the middle . Somebody looked at a creek doing what creeks do and named the whole county after it. Fair enough.

About 21,400 people call it home now, down a notch from the 21,815 the 2020 census counted . Almost all of it rural. Median age north of forty. The kind of place where the population chart doesn't fall off a cliff, it just leaks a little air every year.

Here's the part that'd make a decent country song. Before the Civil War, most of Mississippi was all in on cotton. Tippah wasn't.

By 1860 the county ranked tenth in the state for livestock value and a distant twenty-third for cotton — they were feeding themselves and raising stock while the rest of the state bet the farm on one crop.

Twenty years on, they'd become the biggest tobacco county in Mississippi. Twenty lumber mills. Twenty-one flour mills. A county that fed itself first and worried about the market second.

Now, the courthouse square. William Clark Falkner built the Ship Island, Ripley and Kentucky Railroad through there during Reconstruction, the first narrow-gauge line in north Mississippi.

He wrote novels on the side, too — one of them, "The White Rose of Memphis," sold well enough to get reprinted for decades. A man who laid track by day and dreamed up plots by night.

On November 5, 1889, his old business partner shot him dead on the Ripley square, the evening before Falkner was set to win a seat in the state legislature.

His great-grandson turned out fine. Nobel Prize fine.

William Faulkner built Colonel John Sartoris straight out of the old man, and scholars will point to pieces of him showing up in Thomas Sutpen and maybe Flem Snopes besides.

Every Southern novelist needs a crazy, railroad-building, novel-writing, get-himself-shot ancestor. Faulkner had one on the family tree.

The trading tradition never died either. In 1893, Ripley's merchants started "Grand Bargain Day," the first Monday of every month, so farmers without cash could swap what they had for what they needed right there on the courthouse square .

It never stopped. First Monday Trade Days now spreads across fifty acres and pulls thousands of people into a town of about five thousand, with vendors hauling in from as far as Arizona and New York to sell next to the local farm-implement crowd.

Old-timers grumble it's gone from barter to cash-and-carry. Old-timers grumble about everything. It's still one of the longest-running trade days in the South.

Up the road in Blue Mountain, a preacher named Mark Perrin Lowrey opened a Baptist college for women in 1873 because he figured the South wasn't going to rebuild itself without educating half its population. It stayed women-only until 1956, went fully coed in 2005, and got renamed Blue Mountain Christian University in 2022 . A hundred and fifty years of keeping the lights on in a town most folks outside Mississippi have never heard of.

One more for the trivia file. One of Bill Clinton's great-grandfathers is buried in Tippah County. Small county, big ghosts.

Tippah never had a coal camp or a company store. What it had was dirt worth farming, a railroad man who couldn't stop writing, and a Monday morning tradition that's outlasted the century that started it.

That's stop #155.

THE SKY ABOVE

The autumnal equinox lands Tuesday, September 22, at 8:05 in the evening. Sun crosses the equator dead center. Day and night get about as close to even as they'll ever be, and every hollow in this range starts leaning a little further from the light after that.

Watch the moon swell all week.

It's waxing gibbous Sunday through Friday, getting rounder and harder to ignore parked over the ridgeline. Saturday it goes all the way full. Official peak hits at 12:49 in the afternoon, which does you no good standing in the yard with a thermos.

Catch it at moonrise instead, right around sundown, when it clears the treeline looking like something you could reach up and grab.

That's the Harvest Moon, and it earned the name honest. For a few nights running it rises close to sunset instead of climbing later and later like the moon usually does, so farmers used to get extra hours of light to finish the corn before anybody had a lightbulb to argue with. Saturday night it comes up practically arm in arm with Saturn, low in the east. Worth the mosquito bites.

Look west after supper the rest of the week and there's Venus, low and blazing, hitting its brightest of the whole year right around the 25th and 26th. Mercury's tucked in close beside it if you've got a clear horizon.

Before you're up for coffee, check east. Jupiter's climbing a little higher every morning, and Mars is loitering nearby next to Castor and Pollux, the twin stars, like it missed its ride out of Gemini.

THE GROUND BELOW

The signs say plant above ground this week and dig nothing. Moon's waxing toward full, and the old growers around here still swear anything that fruits or leafs out does better going in while she's filling up.

Save the root crops for the dark of the moon. Whether you believe it or not, half your neighbors do, and they'll tell you so at the feed store whether you asked or not.

Pawpaws are on their way out. Been ripening since mid-August in these hills, and what's still hanging is the last of it, that custardy banana-mango stuff nobody in a grocery store's ever heard of, but every kid who found a patch behind the barn remembers exactly where it was. Lewis and Clark's men ate their way through a pawpaw patch to keep from starving on the way home in 1806. Yours is just dessert.

Monarchs are moving. Late September's thick with them working south through the Bluegrass toward Mexico, riding thermals off these same ridges their great-great-grandparents flew.

Watch the milkweed and the goldenrod. They'll be stacked two and three deep, fueling up before the next push south.

Up high, the leaves have started turning. Nothing dramatic down in the valleys yet, but above four thousand feet the ridgetops are already going color, working down the mountain slow, like somebody easing a blanket off. Give it three or four weeks before it reaches the valley floor.

Woolly worms are out crossing the roads, and you know good and well somebody's already bent over one counting bands. Black means rough winter, brown means easy, thirteen bands for thirteen weeks of whatever's coming.

Scientists will tell you it's just how old the caterpillar is and has nothing to do with the weather. Beattyville, Ky. throws a whole festival over it next month anyway, races and all. I know which explanation I trust more.

And under all that seasonal business, the ground itself keeps thinning out. Twenty-nine of Eastern Kentucky's thirty coalfield counties are now losing more people to death than they're gaining in birth, not moving away, just fewer being born to replace the ones going in the cemetery. Only Whitley County still comes out ahead, and barely, by sixteen souls last year. Harlan's down to about a third of what it was at its peak. That's not a season changing. That's a different kind of leaving.

Shine on, harvest moon. From the Lexington (Ky.) Herald- Leader, published in 1944:

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