I didn’t plant any
potatoes today, but in the 1940s my parents talked about planting the crucial
staple on Good Friday. I remember them actually doing that only once, and that
year we dug up the abandoned garden on our back 40 where a house had once
stood.
Most years the soil
remained too cold until well after Easter. My father didn’t usually till the
big garden behind our house until early May.
You have to prepare
not only your soil but also your potatoes. My parents took potatoes stored in
the storm cellar and inspected them for quality and eyes, the little white
sprouts peeking out of the brown skin. A little before planting they would
carve the eyes from the potatoes, leaving a sizable piece of white to ground
the sprouts.
They’d toss the eyes
into a bucket, and the whole family would go to the garden. My father would
work one row, creating a hole with one whack of his hoe, and my
mother would go down another. My older sister and I dropped in the eyes, making
sure they were looking up at us, and our parents covered them.
I much preferred
planting to harvesting, which came months later. When you dug up potatoes, you
couldn’t jump on a spade to drive it into the earth or even attack with a hoe.
You had to be careful not to cut the potatoes under each plant, and that often
meant loosening the soil with the hoe or spade and then digging with your
hands. Dirty work, but we had to do it.
—Carolyn Mulford
Comments