Gentle Decline 1/21: Potatoes & Papers
Hello. This issue contains nothing at all about COVID-19, and is instead mostly about potatoes. To be fair, it's not even about potatoes as much as it's about digging. Historically inspired digging, even.
We've grown potatoes here before, and also on the allotment (before the allotment got turned into the front lawn of an estate of newly built houses) and they're pretty easy. You stick them in the ground, they grow. There is the risk of blight in warm damp weather, but we've a literal walled garden, and can pay direct attention to them every day, so I don't think it's going to be an issue, and it certainly wasn't before.
The advanced technique, however, depends on an odd characteristic of the potato - and maybe other tubers, I'm not sure - which is that if you bury some of the stem, it turns into root instead, and produces more tubers. So there's a trick called "earthing up" where you wait for the plants to grow, and then bury them again by about 3/4 of their height. You can do that a couple of times, and you get a lot more potatoes. The knock-on effect of this, of course, is that you need soil in which to bury them. Thus, potatoes are traditionally planted in ridges ("drills") with valleys ("furrows"; hence "furrowed brow") between them, and you dig soil out of the valleys in order to earth them up.
This is stuff which any Irish person raised outside a town (and many in towns, too) knows more or less by osmosis. However, I am a dedicated research nerd, and just knowing it isn't good enough for me.
Enter Alan Gailey, who was the director of the Ulster Folk Museum (later the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum), and an absolutely prolific writer of stuff. In this case, I'm looking at a paper he wrote in Tools and Tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes, an academic journal so specific even within the pretty specific contexts of academia that I am honestly amazed it made it as long as it did (1968-1995). The paper was called "SPADE TILLAGE in South-West Ulster and North Connacht", and was in Volume 1, 1968/1971, p. 225, should you want to go look in more detail - the journal is on open access.
That paper describes a method of field tillage, in Cavan and Fermanagh and some surrounding areas, with a particular kind of spade. I'll let Alan describe this bit:
"The basic technique of potato cultivation in ridges, sometimes referred to as lazy beds, remains similar throughout the area, but there is some variation in the kind of spade used. This district lies astride the boundary between communities using one-sided and two- sided spades. Thus the spades used in west county Fermanagh have footrests on each shoulder on opposite sides of a centrally set shaft. In neighbouring parts of north Cavan and Leitrim, however, a one-sided spade survives in use. It has a footrest on whichever side of the shaft is convenient for the spadesman. [...] In view of the similarity of cultivation techniques throughout the whole of this borderland area, it is probable that the intrusive two-sided spades adopted characteristics of the one-sided tools because the cultivation technique remained unaltered. The typological change was also probably influenced by the proximity of small spade mills in south Ulster, which after about 1800 were mass-producing two-sided spades, which could therefore be readily obtained from local retail outlets or direct from the mills. By contrast, until the present century the manufacture of the one-sided spades remained a co-operative effort between a carpenter who produced the ash shaft, and a blacksmith who fitted an open-socketed iron head, although sometimes the farmer who was going to use the tools could produce a shaft for himself."
This stuff fascinates me. Not just a local method of building potato drills, but a specific tool for it, custom-made for each farmer. This kind of bespoke work is nearly unknown now, and was evidently becoming so in the 1800s with the advent of the more generic two-sided spade. These particular spades were called steeveens, which is an excellent word. Obviously, I can't get hold of one of those right now, although Gailey does provide enough detail and diagrams that I could take them to a blacksmith and say "make me one of these". The images show a long, narrow, somewhat scooped spade-head.
But the actual method of tillage, maybe that could be used. Gailey's description is far too long to put here, but basically, you turn up a row of sod on one side, and then you overlap that with another row of sod from the other (ideally with some farmyard manure under the lot, but I don't have access to that). And then you do the same in parallel.
I had this:
...in which you can see an expanse of untended ground, a spaniel, two bins full of leaf mould, some raspberry canes (just right of the bin), and a few branches from the Cox's Orange Pippin which is the only survivor from the 4 fruit trees we put in some years ago. Isambard the spaniel is not a contributor to the gardening efforts here, really; the rest may be.
I also had these:
... neither of which is very like the steeveen, but they can probably be worked with.
I rolled up my sleeves and began digging. The natural soil here is a dense clay, which comes out of the ground in veritable bricks. Fortunately, we've done some work on this before, had raised beds in this area, grown stuff with varied success, and dug in a good bit of organic material. And then let it lie fallow for a few years, just running the lawnmower over it once in a while. Somewhat inconveniently, there's a treestump under there; rather more conveniently, the tree was once part of a field boundary which I suspect has some constructed roman-style stone drains somewhere deep beneath, so the whole area drains rather better than might be expected. The end result of this is pretty decent soil; what the gardening books call a "friable tilth".
Please excuse the badly-drawn-in-Photoshop lines drawn on this next bit:
The red shows where the sods come from (now the furrow), the blue shows where they rest (now the drill). This isn't terribly hard work, once you allow for breaking through some tough roots and working around the occasional stone. The field boundary here was a dry stone wall, and there are many, many stones still here, including several bound up in the roots of the buried treestump, which is in the top left of this picture. At this level, though, previous work has mostly eliminated them. If I dug about 10cm further down, it'd be a different matter.
And after a couple of hours of honestly rather pleasant work, we arrive at this:
Everyone has already made the joke about graves; you don't need to. But these are now ready for the introduction of potatoes. To plant those, I'll make a hole straight down at the apex of the ridge (possibly with a tool called a dibber, a sort of blunt wooden spear with a handle on, if I can get one, and possibly with a sharpened stick, if the pricing or availability offend me) and drop a seed potato into it, before stomping on it gently to close up the hole. Then it's waiting and weeding (and given the number of dandelions and other such unwanted plants that are in the overturned sod, there'll be plenty of that) until the potato plants are high enough to earth up.
The raspberry canes (still only bare silhouettes in either of the pictures above) will produce around August. Over to the right, out of shot on the last picture, are a gooseberry and a blackcurrant bush. The apple tree is there in the left corner. Elsewhere, I'm going to put in a bed for carrots and a bed for peas, and there's already a raised planter with some strawberries in it, and another with some herbs. I might even dig out and resuscitate the old herb bed, which took rather a beating from Isambard when he was much smaller; it's currently the foundation level for a pile of junk awaiting a skip. For my own amusement more than any food provision, I also have seeds on the way for ornamental gourds, which I'm going to hand pollinate (all other pumpkins and gourds I've had before have failed, and I think it's because they don't really have natural pollinators here).
None of this represents enough food to supply us for a year. Well, maybe the potatoes, but that's mostly because we don't actually use all that many at present. The carrots, if there's a big enough bed, might just about make a year's supply. The peas are unlikely to make it more than a few metres from the plants before being eaten. The spaniel has been known to snack on the gooseberries, but even without his intervention, there'll be maybe a couple of kilograms in a good year.
They do, however, represent a little bit of food we don't have to buy. The potatoes in particular would get us through a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months, if they had to. These are essentially training wheels crops, ensuring there's a little more food security, and a little less that needs to be bought, and if they work out ok, we can plant more next year. Maybe if someone else we know has chickens, we can trade potatoes for eggs. If you're reading this, and you're in West Dublin, North Kildare, or South Meath, and have chickens, please let me know.
I feel that small steps like this are about right. We can't switch all the way over into a state of economy and production where we're not dependent on big retail supply lines immediately, but we can do a few bits, and then another few bits, and then if things fall sideways for a while, we'll at least be in a better position.
This issue brought to you by Alan Gailey (1935-2013), a sunny Monday morning, time and space to dig, and the same somewhat bitey cat as last week. The next issue will be a sort of catch-all of questions, news, and some spare thoughts that probably wouldn't make an issue on their own.
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