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Bronze medal depicting potato planting honoring
Potato Planting “It was a hot spring day. The seven planters
were sweating already. As the old tinker said, it was far too hot a
day for working; they ought to have been fast asleep under some trees
where it was shady and cool. A white heat-haze hung on the hills. The
sun was like a huge marigolds in the blue sky right above their heads.
Away on the far side of the field one of the tractors was droning. The
potatoes fell with little thuds into the hot, dry earth where spiders
scurried among the grains of the potato manure like cooking salt. The
planters move slowly down the field, repeating their mechanical movements
below the fiery sun that stung their necks. The old Tinker filled their
sack aprons with the big potatoes as quickly as he could.”
---from The Potato Planters and the Old Joiner’s Funeral
Planting is an act of faith in the future, one of the more pleasing ones we know. It is a ritual of careful preparation, precise steps taken at the right time, whether the planting is done by hand or machine. We recall the fancy footwork of a Dutchman we met in the north of Holland where the main potato crop is grown for industrial use. We asked him to demonstrate for us a wraparound seed bag, for want of a better word, worn over the shoulders and around the back at the waist. He wasn't sure he could remember how. The farmer walked down the row, making a hole for the spud with one foot, dropping in the potato, and tamping dirt down over the earth over the potato with the other foot as he moved rhythmically across the field. He took the potatoes with alternating hands. Delighted that his feet and hands had remembered what his mind had almost forgotten, he told us he had not used the planting bag in about 40 years. Farmers have come up with hundreds of ingenious devices to aid in planting, baskets attached to tubes, cones and funnels. Foot operated planters from the Acme company. Spades called spuds and dibbles which vary from region to region and country to country. And, of course, machines. At a handsome Water Mill, Long Island New York USA
data form we visited one cloudy day years ago, it was one man, machine
and faithful hound. The dog trotted along close behind a four row mechanical
planter moving up and down the rows as his master monitored the seed
potato cylinders at the rear. "Oh yes," said the former, "he's
part of the team. And when he gets tired he rides in the cab." Potato Planting and the Stars
Toward the end of every June, indigenous farmers in the high Andes of Bolivia and Peru look to the stars for a hint of what the weather holds six months down the road. If the 11-star constellation known as the Pleiades appears bright and clear in the pre-dawn sky, they anticipate early, abundant rains and a bountiful potato crop. If the stars appear dim, however, they expect a smaller harvest and delay planting in order to reduce the adverse impact of late and meager precipitation. In
a paper published in the Jan. 6 issue of Nature, a team of scientists
from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory examine this centuries-old
practice to reveal the science behind the folklore. Not only does the
technique work reasonably well, it turns out that the farmers have in
effect been forecasting El Niño for at least 400 years, a capability
modern science achieved less than 20 years ago.
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