(re-post)
My Baba planted potatoes. My father planted potatoes. I plant potatoes. I suspect a long line of ancestors have planted potatoes before us. Perhaps sons and grandchildren will plant potatoes in the future.
You take a potato with eyes and cut it into pieces. "Leave two good eyes in each piece," my father tells me on the phone when I call and say I am planting potatoes. "How many pieces do I put in each spot?" I ask. Sometimes you ask things you already know because it no longer matters that you know, and besides, the sound of advice from a father is nice. "Oh, as many as it takes," he answers. "Draw your line and put them in the hill."
What line? What hill? I wonder after we have hung up. Then comes memory of the large garden by the ravine in St. Thomas, Ontario with lines of hills into which a Virgo father planted potatoes. This Cancer daughter puts a trio of pieces in a circle, fills in the spaces with the cut up pieces of potatoes which were lacking eyes (some notion of becoming nourishment for the winkable ones) then mounds over them and pats the earth into mounds. Once the leaves have come through and the plants are serious looking, I will surround each mound with a bottomless bucket or cylinder of some sort. And keep adding dirt as the plant grows higher. I have an image of the potato plant elbowing its way up the tube.
When harvest time comes the cylinder will be removed and the new potatoes dug out. It is quite amazing how many potatoes can grow in that column!
My father did not grow his potatoes this way: he let them grow in hills. So I have created an aberration. I do not now recall who led me so spudily astray.
It doesn’t matter. How fascinating - and wonderful - that - however - we are potato planters.
Posted on May 30, 2007 at 06:15 AM | Permalink
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