Part 2

Hazel did not invite Netty to come live with her, and Netty did not ask. Both of them understood something about the other without discussing it. They were people who needed their own space, their own territory, and their own solitude. But Hazel began coming to the cave every few days, and what she brought was more valuable than food or blankets. She brought knowledge.

Hazel knew which plants were edible and which were poison. She knew where ginseng grew and how to harvest it without killing the patch. She knew how to read weather, the behavior of animals, and the color of the sky. She also knew something else, something that would become the foundation of everything Netty built.

She knew about the old root cellars. Scattered throughout those mountains were dozens of abandoned homesteads from an earlier generation of settlers, families who had tried to farm the steep hillsides and eventually given up or been driven out by the difficulty of it. Many of them had dug root cellars into the hillsides, using the same principle that made Netty’s cave warm: the earth’s constant temperature. Some of these cellars were substantial, stone-lined chambers 10 or 12 ft deep, built with the careful masonry of people who had intended to stay forever.

“Your cave is just a big root cellar that God dug,” Hazel told her 1 afternoon. “But root cellars can do more than store food. A man over in Wise County, Virginia, years back, he grew lettuce and mushrooms in his cellar all winter long. Temperature stays the same. You just need light for the lettuce.”

That sentence, you just need light, planted a seed in Netty’s mind that would grow for the next 60 years.

When spring came, Netty emerged from her cave winter thinner, harder, and burning with an idea. She spent that first spring and summer doing 2 things: growing food to survive and experimenting. Using the trowel she had bought and tools Hazel lent her, she cleared a small patch of ground near the cave entrance where sunlight reached for about 6 hours a day. She planted beans, squash, and corn, the traditional 3 sisters her mother had grown. She composted leaves, creek muck, and her own waste, building soil the way her mother had taught her. The garden was tiny, barely 10 sq ft, but it produced.

At the same time, she began modifying the cave. She remembered something from 1 of Mr. Callaway’s books, a description of how Korean and Chinese farmers had for centuries grown vegetables in partially underground structures that trapped heat from the sun during the day and released it slowly at night. The book had called them underground greenhouses or walipinis. The principle was simple: dig into a south-facing hillside, create a sloped roof of transparent material to let in sunlight, and let the earth’s warmth do the rest. Netty could not afford glass, but she could reshape the entrance to her cave.

Over the course of that first summer, working with a hand trowel, a borrowed pickaxe, and her bare hands, Netty widened the cave entrance to about 12 ft across. She dug out the floor on the south side, creating a sloped growing bed that angled upward toward the light. She built a frame from hickory poles and stretched over it the only transparent material she could find, oiled flour sacks that Hazel helped her prepare by rubbing them with rendered lard until they became translucent. It was not glass. It let in perhaps a 3rd of the light glass would have, but it let in light.

That first underground garden was laughably small, about 60 sq ft of growing space tucked into the mouth of a limestone cave in the Kentucky mountains. But in December 1935, when the temperature outside dropped to 10°, Netty Groves harvested a head of lettuce from that growing bed. It was small and pale and slightly bitter, and she ate it with tears running down her face because it tasted like proof: proof that she was not crazy, proof that what she had imagined was real, proof that something could grow even in the darkest, coldest season if a person understood the science behind it.

By the 2nd year, word had begun to spread. A hunter passing through noticed the garden outside the cave and stopped to talk. A woman from a settlement 8 miles away heard about the cave girl and came to see for herself. Hazel, who despite her solitude was connected to the mountain gossip network in the way all longtime residents are, began telling people what Netty was doing.

The reactions were mixed. Some thought she was touched in the head. A girl living in a cave and growing lettuce underground sounded like a fairy tale or a symptom of madness. But others, especially women who understood what it meant to watch children go hungry in February, were curious.

In the spring of 1936, 3 women from Ky Creek walked up the mountain to see Netty’s operation. She showed them everything: the cave, the growing beds, the oiled-sack panels, and the composting system. She explained the science as best she understood it, talking about soil temperature, light angles, and the way the limestone walls stored heat during the day. The women listened quietly. One of them, a mother of 6 named Birdie Shepherd, stood in the cave mouth looking at the small green shoots pushing up from the growing bed in March while snow still lay on the ground outside and said, “Lord have mercy. Can you teach me this?”

Netty could, and she did.

Over the next 5 years, Netty Groves taught more than 40 families in Harlan and Letcher counties how to build what she called earth shelters, simple underground growing structures built into south-facing hillsides using local materials. The designs evolved as she learned. The oiled flour sacks were replaced with actual glass when a window factory in Corbin started selling cracked and imperfect panes at a penny apiece. The growing beds got deeper and more sophisticated. Netty developed a system of reflective surfaces, sheets of tin from flattened cans that bounced additional light onto the growing beds. She figured out that certain crops thrived in the low-light conditions: lettuce, spinach, kale, radishes, turnips, and herbs.

She experimented with mushroom cultivation in the deeper parts of the cave where no light reached at all, eventually growing enough shiitake and oyster mushrooms to begin trading them. The trading was how she met Thomas Ren. Thomas was 23, a quiet young man from over the mountain in Bell County, who had been driving a truck for a lumber company until the company went under. He had heard about the woman selling winter mushrooms and fresh greens at the crossroads market and had driven 20 miles to see whether it was true.

He found Netty behind a rough table with bundles of spinach, bags of dried mushrooms, and jars of pickled ramps arranged with a precision that spoke of pride in the product.

“You grew all this?” he asked.

“Every bit of it,” she said. “Under.”

He bought mushrooms. He came back the following week and bought greens. The 3rd week, he came back and asked whether he could see how she did it.

Netty showed him the cave and the earth shelters she had helped build on 3 neighboring properties, and the network of families who were now growing food through the winter for the 1st time in their lives. Thomas Ren fell in love with the operation first and the woman 2nd, which was exactly the right order for someone like Netty.

They married in the fall of 1939 in a small ceremony outside the cave that had become Netty’s home and headquarters. Hazel Combs attended, sitting in a chair Thomas carried up the hill for her. She was 76 by then, and she told anyone who would listen that she had delivered the bride.

The following year, 1940, 2 things happened that changed the scale of everything. First, Hazel Combs died in her sleep in February and left her cabin and 12 acres of land to Netty. 2nd, a county agricultural extension agent named Robert Fairchild came to see Netty’s earth shelters as part of a government survey of innovative farming practices.

Fairchild was stunned. He had studied agriculture at the University of Kentucky and had never seen anything quite like what this young woman had built. She was using principles of thermal mass, passive solar gain, and protected cultivation that were known in academic circles, but had never been applied in that way, in that terrain, with those materials. He wrote a report that found its way to the state agricultural office in Frankfort, and within 6 months Netty received a visit from 2 professors and a request to participate in a formal study.

The attention brought something else: contact with Sutter’s Hollow. Word travels in mountain communities. It is slow, but it is relentless. By 1941, the people of Sutter’s Hollow had heard about Netty Groves. Some of them remembered the girl Cora Sloan had turned out 7 years earlier. They remembered watching her walk down the road. And now here she was, featured in a state agricultural report, teaching families across 2 counties how to grow food through the winter.

Cora Sloan heard about it too. In the winter of 1942, when the war had taken most of the young men and food was scarcer than ever, Cora’s stubbornness finally cracked. She sent word through a cousin asking whether Netty would come and teach the people of Sutter’s Hollow how to build earth shelters.

Netty could have refused. She had every right to. She had every reason to. The woman who had thrown her out into the cold, who had slapped her for telling the truth, who had chosen a man’s comfort over a child’s safety, was now asking for help. Thomas, who knew the full story, told Netty it was her decision, and he would support whatever she chose. Hazel was not there to give advice anymore, but Netty could almost hear the old woman’s voice: spite never grew a single thing worth eating.

Netty went to Sutter’s Hollow.

She arrived on a cold morning in January, and half the town turned out to meet her. Cora was not among them. She stayed in her house, unable or unwilling to face the girl she had wronged. But Dale Sloan was gone, drafted and sent to North Africa, and the house was Cora’s problem alone now, along with 2 children who were hungry.

Netty did not make a speech. She did not demand an apology. She walked the hillsides around Sutter’s Hollow, identified 3 good sites for earth shelters, and began teaching. She stayed for 2 weeks, sleeping in Mrs. Eubanks’s spare room, Mrs. Eubanks, who had given her the tin of sardines years earlier and who now wept openly when she saw the woman Netty had become.

On the last day, as Netty was loading tools into Thomas’s truck, Cora Sloan walked down the road to where she stood. The older woman’s face was drawn and tired. She looked as though she had aged 20 years in 7.

“I was wrong,” Cora said. It was barely above a whisper. “About everything. I was wrong about you, and I was wrong about him, and I’ve been wrong about most things in my life.”

Netty looked at her aunt for a long time. Then she reached into the truck bed and pulled out a bundle, a package of seeds wrapped in cloth with planting instructions written in Netty’s careful hand.

“Start with the lettuce,” Netty said. “It’s the most forgiving.”

Part 3

Over the decades that followed, Netty and Thomas Ren expanded their operation far beyond what that lonely girl in a cave could have imagined. By the 1950s, they had built 23 earth shelters across their property and Hazel’s former land, and they were producing fresh greens, mushrooms, and herbs 12 months a year. They supplied a growing number of families, schools, and eventually small markets across eastern Kentucky.

The university partnership led to a formal research program, and Netty became an unpaid but widely respected consultant on cold-climate agriculture. They had 3 children, 2 daughters and a son, all of whom grew up understanding soil and seasons the way other children understood arithmetic. The eldest daughter, Pearl, named for Netty’s mother, eventually earned a degree in agricultural science and returned to the mountains to continue the work.

Netty Groves Ren died on a September morning in 1996 at the age of 78. She died in the cabin that had been Hazel Combs’s cabin, which she and Thomas had expanded over the years into a warm, book-filled home. Thomas had died 2 years earlier. Their children and 7 grandchildren were nearby. The earth shelters were still producing.

At her funeral, attended by more than 300 people, Birdie Shepherd’s eldest grandson, now a man in his 60s, stood up and said that his family had not gone hungry a single winter since 1936, and that was because of Netty Groves.

The Netty Ren Center for Sustainable Mountain Agriculture, established the year after her death, still operates on the family land today. It teaches the same principles Netty figured out in a cave with a trowel and a stack of borrowed books: that the earth itself wants to help you grow things if you pay attention, that warmth exists beneath the surface even in the coldest season, and that what looks like a hole in the ground can become a garden.

Her life posed its own question. What would anyone have done standing on that dirt road at 16 with $10 and a canvas bag? Most people will never face that exact test, but everyone faces some version of it: the moment when the world says they are not wanted, not valued, not enough, the moment when everything they thought was solid falls away and they are left with nothing but what they carry inside.

Netty Groves carried curiosity. She carried her mother’s knowledge of soil and her father’s love of books. She carried a stubborn refusal to believe that the world’s opinion of her was the final word. From those things, from the very things nobody could take away because nobody thought they were worth taking, she built a life that fed hundreds of families and outlasted everyone who had ever doubted her.

Sometimes the most remarkable lives begin in the most unremarkable places: a dirt road, a canvas bag, a cave in the mountains, and the stubborn belief that something can grow even in the darkest season.