Planting Potatoes

The Second of Two Potato Patches

The potatoes are in the ground - 50 pounds of Kennebec seeds, which turned into almost 300 hills of potatoes.

We planted the first batch of potatoes on June 10, in the garden above the house. Dad tilled the patch on the 9th, breaking soil out of the grip of witchgrass and weeds. The tiller bounced and clanked mightily over some buried boulders that are part of the mountain, and Dad thought some of the tiller tines must have been damaged, but that was not the case - not until he tilled the other garden, and hit the anchored boulders over there. Such are the dangers of gardening in glacial till.

Lucy and Ber were here that weekend, and so there were many hands making light work of the laborious task. Well... it still wasn't light work... but it did go faster.

The Humphrey Hoe

The tools we needed were few: a long length of baling twine tied between two stakes, used for marking the rows; a 3-pound stone hammer, for driving in the stakes; the Humphrey hoe; the potato hook; a bucket for the compost and another for the seed potatoes.

Dad cut the seed, which Ber had brought. He sat on a pillow, on an upturned bucket in the barn, cutting the seed and spreading them out to dry on a sheet of plastic.

We stretched the line the length of the garden, and Lucy grabbed the Humphrey hoe and asked, "How far apart do the holes go?" "About a stride," I said. "Dig one, step in it, dig another as far apart as you step." "Gotcha." She scraped a shallow hole about a foot across, stepped in it, dug another, and went on down the row.

We usually use a 5-10-10 rock phosphate to fertilize the potatoes, tossing a small handful into each hole. Since we could not find any phosphate this year (well, we did, but did not want to take the time to drive to Chester), we used well-composted horse manure, the consistency of crumbly soil. After Lucy had dug a complete row, Ber came along behind with a bucket of the composted manure and tossed a double handful in each hole.

I started setting the seed - placing a piece cut-side-down in each hole, but Lucy, having dug a row and a half in a hurry, was flagging, and I offered to switch places with her. She then happily set the seed, singing to it as she did. "Grow, little potatoes, grow..."

A seed potato nestled in, ready to be covered

Once two rows were seeded, I started covering them - raking a couple of inches of soil over the top of each seed and giving each hill a little pat with the hoe. When that was done, we started digging more holes, first marking the rows, pounding the oak marking stakes in with the hammer. Some patches of the garden had not been tilled deep, and Ber broke up this harder soil with the potato hook before the holes were dug.

We had neared the end of our eighth row when we heard a tapping sound from up on the hill. We thought Dad might be making noise to drive off a squirrel or something, but the sound continued, and Ber went up to investigate. We heard her make some exclamation, and then laugh, and a moment later she appeared at the top of the garden and called for us to come help, as Dad had tipped over!

The bucket on which Dad had seated himself had been slowly hitching backward as he moved, and unbeknownst to him, was slowly collapsing as well. It eventually folded up under him, tipping him over backwards - not a fall, but a subsidence. Poor Dad laid there, reclined on the pillow, for about ten minutes before Ber went to check on him. He was quite comfortable, and said he almost fell asleep, lying there and looking out at the trees.

It took all three of us to get Dad onto his feet; we had to help him roll over and get to his knees, then haul him upright and brush the dirt off from him. he was unhurt, but put out at being unable to get up by himself. He decided he'd had enough for the day, and went inside. When he reached the house, he told Mom, "I got cast!" - referring to a horse that falls in such a way that it can't get up.

Lucy took the folded-up bucket and threw it into the dumpster (we have one here so we can clean out the cellar), and it went all to pieces, and she had to gather up the bits that scattered around.

So... we got 8 rows planted, averaging about 20 hills per row. Not bad for a couple hours' work. Ber and Lucy had to go back to their respective homes that day, so we had to stop, even though there were a lot of potatoes still to plant.

In subsequent days, Dad took the tractor over to the other garden and tilled and re-tilled the upper piece, a fairly flat piece of ground hedged in by scrubby woods. It was while tilling this piece that he ran over some boulders and bent some of the tines on his tiller. Yesterday, he hauled the equiplent over - hoes, buckets, potatoes, composted manure, and a bag with a couple of pounds of phosphate, which had turned up in the greenhouse. He went over while I wasn't looking and dug a row of holes and dropped in the phosphate, before having to return for a drink of water. While he was resting, I took off for the field and worked steadily. I got 4 rows planted, and the holes dug for the last 53 hills when Dad returned.

It was dusty work, but the air was sweet and mild. Though the sun shone from high in a midsummer sky, there was a cooling breeze, and I had a bottle of cold water in the shade. Birds sang all around - warblers, sparrows, thrushes, and, high up on the mountain, the startling screams of a flock of young ravens. I could smell the warm soil, and the green grass and leaves, and the sweet resinous scent of warm pines.

When Dad arrived, he cut some row markers while I scooped manure into the holes, then started setting the last 2 rows of seeds. He couldn't finish that task, as it was very hard on his back, so he gave me the bucket of seeds and took the hoe, and started covering the seeds.

Dad, the Potato Shaman, in his element

We planted a total of 112 hills. All they need is time, and some water; the soil was pretty dry, after this extended spell of sweet sunny weather. We expect some thundershowers later this week and perhaps some rain next week. That will be good.

The potatoes in the first patch are beginning to crack the ground, and with the hot weather due this week, some will be poking tiny, dark-green curled leaves into the air.

I remember when we got 15 bushels (from over 100lb of seed). I remember the year we had some potatoes that tipped the scales at over 2-1/2 pounds EACH. Not a lot, but some.  I don't anticipate either thing to happen this year. But we will get some potatoes -  a few bushels. They will come rolling out of the cold soil in October, when the air smells of frosted grass and fallen leaves, and the sunlight will come clear and brittle through the leafless trees.

When we dig them, and when we make meals of them throughout the winter, we will remember the bright sunny days when we planted them, and the memory will drive the cold and dark away.

The Stone Place

A couple of summers ago, Ber and I decided to go for a ride - just jump in the car and go somewhere, without planning. We drove over through Livermore Mills (a village that is barely there anymore) to Peru, and bought a big Italian sandwich at a deli, and ate it while sitting in a cellarhole on the manicured Peru common.

Cellarhole on the Common. Not Tavern on the Green, but a lovely spot for a picnic. 

After our picnic, we drove around on the dirt roads that lace through the woods, and decided to go up to The Stone Place. It is the site of a former farm, now completely wooded over, in the Green Mountain National Forest.

Griffith Brook, running very low.

The road is quite ordinary for the first quarter-mile, a narrow but well-maintained gravel road leading to a house. Beyond the house, however, the road becomes much more interesting. It is one lane, two tire-tracks with a high row of grass and weeds growing between them, and trees and ferns pressing close on either side. For all of its primitive nature, however, it is kept open and passable, to a point, and we were able to drive perhaps another mile into the woods. We parked in a broad clearing and walked the rest of the way, crossing a plank bridge over Griffith Brook, which, in the middle of that dry summer, was reduced to a froggy-smelling trickle. 

The road turns uphill, away from the brook, and toward a stand of young trees growing in a large area that was clear-cut about twenty years ago. It is here that we found the graveyard. Of course we knew it was there, but it is always a little strange to come across a graveyard so far away from habitation.

The Stone Family Cemetery

It is a small plot; only five gravestones stand inside a tiny, fenced area. Five members of the Stone family rest there, surrounded by birches and spruces and ash trees. The Forest Service maintains the plot, clearing it once a year and removing any fallen trees. There is no gate in the spiky iron fence, so unless one wants to risk being impaled, one has to be content with squinting at the inscriptions from outside the enclosure.

We decided to keep going up the hill, following the old road up the side of the mountain. We scuffed through sedgy grass, and stopped to admire the beautiful, rare bottle gentian that grew there. We found a hop-vine climbing a spindly cherry tree, and explored the remains of an old orchard, where gnarled, twisted apple trees dropped their fruit for the benefit of the wildlife. The ground beneath the treees had been cleared; we assume it is the work of the Forest Service, creating good browsing places for the deer.

"Want to keep going?" Ber asked after we had left the orchard, and stood in the road, looking uphill and down.

"Hmm..." I looked up the hill, along the path we had not let trod, and down the hill, the way we had come. My knee ached, and I knew the ball game would start soon. "Let's go up a little farther."

We climbed the hill, and the path soon went under the trees, in a place that had not been cut-over in many decades. The woods were dense here, still and quiet and sweet.

The Doorstep

Looking to the east side of the path, we saw the outlines of some stone walls, and went to investigate. We found that the stones formed a rectangle, and soon realized that we had found the remains of the house - the house the Stone family had built. We stood on the broad, flat doorstep that must have led to the main entrance, and I wondered, how many times dis someone gratefully cross that threshhold, going in after a hard day's work, into the cool house, or out of the cold, to get warm near the fire?

Bricks from the Chimney

We found not only the house, but the foundations of the barn - a much larger square, and the stone walls that formed a kind of funnel leading from the road to the barn. This was where they drove the sheep and cattle into the barn from the pastures, or out to the road, to be carted off to market.

We found bricks, which some previous explorer had pulled from the debris and left piled on a wall. They were weathered, and green with moss, but we could not help thinking of the chimney that must have stood there, long ago.

In poking around the corner of the house foundation, I found a bit of metal protruding from under a rock, and pulled it out. It was a horseshoe, heavily encased in rust. Ber and I passed it back and forth, and then I tucked it back into its hidey-hole, knowing that if I left it in sight, someone would take it away, and somehow, we didn't think it ought to leave this place.

The Cistern, and the Ash Tree that Split It

Ber found a cistern - one of the only pieces of concrete we found there. It was a large square vessel, split in two by the growing of a huge ash tree. The bole of the tree was squared off from having grown in the cistern, and then it had outgrown its dimensions, and split the concrete apart.

"The well can't be far from here," Ber said. "They wouldn't have piped water very far." Within minutes she had found the well, too. It was very near the house foundation, almost built into the cellar wall. It was hooded over with a couple of slabs of rock, to keep unwary people and animals from falling in, but there was enough of a gap to peer in, and see the circular stone wall of the well descending into the earth.

The Well

"Think there's any water in it?" I asked.

Ber peered in, as much as she could. "I can't see any," she said, "But it's been such a dry year..."

Inside the Well

I couldn't see any better than she could, so opened the flash on my camera and stuck my hand in the hole, and snapped a few pictures. Sure enough, beyond the litter of leaves and spiderwebs, there was the glint of water. Whoever had sited that well had chosen a good place.

It was beautiful there - serene and fragrant with the scents of ferns and earth. The woods were almost silent, but for the quiet trickle of a vireo's song. We stood and looked at the traces of the buildings that were just visible - stone walls, slowly disappearing beneath leaf-mold, delineating the footprints of the house and barn, and the outlines of the paddocks and meadows. We looked at the apple trees - no doubt the descendants of the Stones' original trees - and knew that if we looked, we could probably find roses and lilac bushes, and wondered if there were still daffodils that bloomed early in the spring.

"They did so much work," I said. "Think of all the work it took to clear the land by hand, and root out the stumps, and build the walls, and the buildings... and now it's all gone."

Ber climbing out of the barn cellarhole; house foundation to the right

 

It must have been backbreaking, endless work. Cutting the trees, digging and lining the cellarholes and the well, hauling god-only-knows how many tons of rocks to make the walls and foundations, hauling the lumber and bricks to build with. I wondered what the house had looked like - whether it had plaster walls, and if there had been any decoration. There must have been; even the poorest farmers had some kind of color in their homes - stencils on the walls, a glass vase, patterned china dishes, inexpensive framed lithographs, fuzzy gray photos of family members, colorful quilts on the beds. What kind of home had they made here, miles from the village, on a southeast-facing mountainside? Where are their descendants now? Are there any stories in the family of the long-vanished farm, any photos of it, tintypes stashed away in a trunk someplace?

Ber looked off toward the valley. "They must have had a fantastic view."

Indeed - with the spread of the valley below, and the rumpled mountains crowned in the distance by the rounded bulk of Stratton Mt. The view was, of course, blocked now by the dense growth of trees. "I wonder if they had time to look at it," I said.

The farm was abandoned sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. Bricks, window glass and roof slates were probably salvaged or scavenged; meadows went rank with goldenrod, then hardhack, scrubby trees and then encroaching forest. The orchards no longer provided apples for cider and vinegar, but food for deer and bears. The hop vines went untrained and unpruned; their descendants still tangle the trees beside the road. Dad says he remembers going up there when he was a little kid in the 1920s and '30s, and seeing the derelict remains of the house slowly decaying into the ground, before the Forest Service and the CCCs went in and knocked it down and took away the debris.

We left it, left the cellarholes and stone walls and broken cistern to the silence of the woods, where the July evening sunlight was angling through the trees. We walked out past the apple trees, dropping fat yellow apples on the ground, past the hop-vines, past the cemetery where no one places flowers, but where the blue bottle gentian grows wild. Down the long hill, over the bouncy plank bridge, out on the narrow ribbon of road toward the sounds and sights of people.

2012 Official Where The Heck has Winter Been Day

(Written on March 1, 2012. Forgotten for more than 3 months, but here it is.)

Today is the first day of March. Since it is a Leap Year, winter is one day longer than usual, and yet it has taken until today to get a decent snowstorm. Normally I'd be writing my Officially Sick of Winter entry... but we have not had any winter to speak of, so how can I be sick of it?

There was a storm on the last weekend of October, but it dropped at most 6" on ground not yet frozen, and it all melted away before too many days had passed. There was snow on the ground for Thanksgiving, but by early December, that too was gone. There was no white Christmas here, and the only precipitation we saw for most of January was frequent hard rain that ate the frost out of the ground, and made the riverbanks, grievously wounded by last summer's floods, to melt away and crumble into the river, turning the water an awful murky dun color, like coffee with too much cream in it. What ice did form in the rivers was made of muddy water, and each rainfall would heave jumbled stacks of mud-ice blocks onto the riverbanks.

The hardest snowfall in January was a stationary squall that sat on the mountains between here and Manchester on the night of January 13th. My windshield wipers suddenly refused to function, so I rode with Linda, and we came up to Rawsonville. It snowed as hard that evening as I have ever seen it snow; we literally could not see ten feet in front of the truck, and sometimes could not see past the frantic wipers. It took an hour to travel the 15 miles from there to here, and by the time we reached home, Linda was a trembling wreck. Within an hour of our arrival, the snow had stopped and the clouds dissolved, leaving a star-dusted sky behind, as if to mock us and say, "see, you should have stayed put for another hour, and you'd have been all right."

Stupid weather.

February is often the coldest month, when the snow is deepest, and the deep frost buckles roads into wrinkled, broken devices of torment, when rivers are usually invisible under their blankets of snow-covered ice. This year, February was mild. Temperatures in the mid-40s were common, and nudged 50 degrees in warm valleys late in the month. In most locations beneath, say, 2000 feet in elevation, the ground was bare. Lawns started to have the soggy green look of early spring. Snowdrops emerged and budded.

On Leap Day, however, the snow began to fall. It came down pretty steadily all afternoon, and had accumulated about 4" by nightfall. Of course, I had to make an emergency trip to work, and drove home on a sloppy road, but it wasn't a bad drive. I've driven in worse.

Today it has snowed all day, sometimes hard, sometimes not snowing much at all. The radar picture shows another burst of snow coming from the west; the storm should be pretty well played out by nightfall, and will have left us with about 12".

The old hitching post in the front yard

This morning I went for a short walk up into the woods, while it was still snowing quite hard. Once I got up among the trees, there was almost perfect silence around me, save for the whisper of snow falling through the dry beech leaves, and the distant, muted sounds of traffic on the road - the scrape and rumble of a plow, the purr of a car passing, its tires silenced by the snow in the road. There were no birds in the woods; all the little feathered freeloaders were congregated around the feeders in the back yard, but even there they were not making much sound. It was mostly the soft buzz of their wings, the little kissing sounds the juncos make, and the occasional cussing of blue jays.

The woods were so peaceful. The columns of trees reached high overhead, darkening the already dim daylight, and holding little clumps of snow on bumps in their bark. There were no tracks, save the little stitched trail where a mouse had emerged from the snow and bounded across the path. The air was cold, but not bitter, and smelled fresh and clean - the exact but indefinable scent of snow.

I returned to the house when the wind came up a little, and thick white plumes of snow began to fall from the trees. I didn't want to get buried, so came back home, and changed into a more waterproof jacket, and went to start the tractor.

It wouldn't start, of course.

I shoveled out the area in front of the garage, and then returned to the house to tell Dad I couldn't get the thing to go. So Dad pulled on his boots - a laborious task, with his bad knees, hips and back - and got his coat and hat, and walking sticks, and we went over to the tractor, and he tried to start it, and it wouldn't go for him, either. We ran an extension cord out and plugged in the tractor's block heater, and we slogged back to the house, where Dad pored over the tractor manual, and then called Dave, the indispensable, and we waited.

After a little while Dad said he had an idea, and wanted to go back out, so he donned his warm things and scuffed back over to the garage. I had to get some supper going, and so started a pot of soup, planning to go over as soon as it was on the stove to simmer, but in the meantime, Dave pulled in and plowed a lot of the driveway, and helped Dad get the tractor started, so Dad cleared the rest of the yard, and I got the soup going.

It's just about 4pm now, and snowing quite hard again, though I doubt it will fill up the driveway.  The soup is bubbling happily on the stove. Mom is napping on the sofa; Dad has changed to warm dry clothes, and it's about time I took my boots off, because I'm not going out in the snow again, I don't think. Though it may be my last chance this winter to go out into the snow, I will pour a cup of Darjeeling and let the storm finish up without my interference.