The Potato Digger
October 13, 2010
We were keen to plant things this spring and I had two garden plots all worked up, so in one we put lots of corn and then finished it out with last year’s Russet potatoes cut up as seed.
All went well until we began to worry about a raccoon attack upon the corn. There was nothing for it but to put up the electric fence. It clicked away and we relaxed. No raccoons attacked, even though I noticed some weeks later that the end of the wire attached to the fencer was hanging down behind the generator, grounding against it. So there never was a shock in the line, but the raccoons stayed away anyway.
The unintended consequence of this was that the potato patch was protected not only from raccoons, but also from the roto-tiller. The weeds joined in with the rampant growth of potato plants to make a thick, green mass.
It all came to a head last weekend when my wife announced that it was time to plant the garlic. “Uh, there are still four rows of potatoes in that space.” Bet waited until I was away and had at it with a garden fork. She made good headway, filling a wheelbarrow with a frenetic morning of digging. Then she could barely move for the rest of the week.
I decided to grab a fork and dig the things and be done with it, but I didn’t last as long as Bet before my back showed signs of giving out.
There’s nothing like a lame back to make a man think.
When I was little, my dad used a walking plough behind Old Jess to furrow the potatoes in and then dig them up again. He and Old Jess would roll them out neatly, and Glenda, Mom and I would scramble to pick them up before the next pass.
First I tried and discarded the furrower attachment for the tiller because it didn’t dig deeply enough to root out the potatoes without making gritty French fries out of them. Removing the tiller’s tines would be a lot of work, and the purpose of this procedure was to save labour, not increase it.
Internet research suggested that garden tractors don’t do well on ploughs. For example the leading maker of garden ploughs uses a 33 hp, 4WD tractor to pull the little single-bottom 12″ unit in demonstrations. Turning the soil requires weight and traction.
But I have two 35 hp tractors. Why fool with a toy when I can use the real thing? Out I went to the pile of weeds by the barn. My first plough, a 3 pt. hitch 3 X 16″, lay mouldering there, easily the worst implement I have ever bought. It was so poorly balanced, bent and awkward that I put a hole in the floor of my trailer just loading the thing. Later I tried removing one of the moldboards to see if that would help. It didn’t, but my friend Tom ended up with a brutally effective anchor for a floating dock from the left third of the plough.
I resolved to build an adult-sized, single-bottom plough from the remaining scrap iron and use it as a potato digger. An hour of fruitless grinding at the bolts at least allowed enough time for the penetrating oil to work, and after a few satisfying smashes with an eight-pound sledge the nuts turned right off. I dropped the right third of the assembly and put it back together with just the centre section remaining.
The only way to keep the thing upright while I hitched it to the TAFE was to hold it off the ground with the Massey.
Away I went to experiment on the potatoes. Down went the plough point. Ahead surged the tractor. A magnificent furrow appeared behind. Perfect, except that I didn’t see a single potato.
Maybe I missed the row. Tried again. Now I had two, almost parallel furrows, and no potatoes. Now what? Keep trying? A third pass between the others and a few fractions of potatoes appeared.
I walked along the row. An occasional potato fell out at my kicks. Before long I was digging through the debris by hand, looking for survivors. Most showed grievous injury, though a few small tubers had escaped.
More passes with the plough and the garden took on the appearance of a compost heap after a good turning. But the potatoes weren’t coming out of the ground the way they did for my dad and Old Jess.
So I gathered up the pitiful survivors in a large plastic pail and set it in the loader for the ride to the house. Started off. Heard a “crunch.” Somehow the pail had fallen out of the loader and I had crushed it under the tractor. Once again I rounded up the dwindling supply of potatoes and trundled them up the hill, ruing yet another session with this last remnant of the sorriest of all possible ploughs.
Roz and Charlie discover real food
October 11, 2009
All summer when Roz came to the farm she would spend just enough time with us to be polite, and then she would disappear. Occasional searches would turn her up in the garden, sitting or lying in a row, plucking weeds from around her cherished plants. Roz had never been around a garden until she discovered Forfar.
So this year I involved her in the seed purchases and even put up with her desire to have green beans (too much work), peas (blow over in a good breeze), and beets (yuck!). Kohlrabi and butternut squash made it into the basket as well. Roz is very fit and relentless when it comes to work. Bet and I didn’t resist when Roz read the instructions on the seed packs and methodically planted the seeds in the rows I had laid out in the garden.
This task requires more than my personal capacity for patience and bending. Other years I would stuff a package of seeds into a seeding wheel, take aim down a row and walk until the seed gave out. This could occur anywhere from three feet in to halfway to the stake at the other end. So I’d start with another packet of something from the other end. The large gaps in the middle of the rows were ideal areas for melons to spread, so it usually worked out fairly well in my tangle. I also discovered that volunteer tomatoes look much less weedy than other weeds.
This year Roz showed up each week to check on the progress of her seeds. The rain wiped out the cucumbers, tomatoes and melons, but she lovingly tended the surviving root vegetables, communing for hours with her charges, plucking the weeds from their midst with a delicate, two-fingered grip.
And then came the harvests. The girl was so delighted with her first bowl of peas that I couldn’t rain on her parade. And she didn’t mind the work of picking the string beans. But the beets! Oh man, the beets! The rest of the folks at the table were raving about these bleeding red things, and Bet had shrewdly added some feta and garlic to the mix, so I ate a few slices. The horrible-taste memory of my childhood fell away in an instant and I very much enjoyed this new food.
After losing a war with the raccoons I vowed never again to grow sweet corn. But Roz had never had a corn patch, so we put in five rows. The raccoons struck on schedule, but Tony helped me build an electric fence around the patch. It worked. We saved the rest of the crop.
Roz remembered her garden: “I enjoyed it all far more than was reasonable. I don’t know why. I love picking raspberries. Maybe it has to do with pride in something you think you have created. Even though I know it’s cheaper to buy any of those foods than my time is worth, there’s something that makes me incredibly proud when I make a dish from ingredients that I’ve grown. I confess more than once I ate beets and raspberries until I made myself sick on them, especially the raspberries. But it’s because I enjoy collecting them so much.
“At Thanksgiving dinner in Ancaster when I told Papou* about my vegetables, my grandfather immediately insisted that we make the trip to his house to see his garden before the sun went down. He does so much. He gave us eggs, figs, pears, oregano. With the language barrier when I was a little kid I never really paid attention to him, but now I wonder if there is something hereditary in the pride he takes in his self-sufficiency, because I really enjoyed the garden and I have no idea why.”
Charlie and Martin’s syrup-making exploits last March continue to reverberate in the family as we work our way through their product. I asked Charlie what possessed him to take on such a project.
“The trees were there, and the stuff costs fifteen dollars a bottle. Roz makes me pancakes on Saturday morning and she kept sending me to buy the syrup.”
Of course Charlie and Martin had many commitments during the day so they did all of the work at night. Charlie didn’t see anything particularly unusual about that. “If you only have a two week season, odds are pretty good you’ll work most of the day on it.”
I asked him to explain the essential difference between maple syrup and corn syrup, the current nutritional public enemy #1. “Syrup is a lot more expensive and dangerous. You create it by boiling something over open flames. And inherently less is produced, so it’s less fattening. There’s also something exciting about making it.”
Roz is already making plans for next year. “I found myself thinking that the peas were more work than they’re worth, so I’ll plant more beans next year. Yesterday my grandmother dismissed rutabagas as cattle feed, but I found that you can make a rutabaga pie, and even a carrot pie. You cannot, however, make kohlrabi pie, so I think we can do with fewer of them next year and more carrots.”
*This is the simplest of five or six different spellings of the Greek term of endearment for grandfather, each of which someone on the Internet claims is correct.
the Walnut Diary 