Thoughts Thunk while
Digging Potatoes by Hand
by Tom Roberts, Fall 2004
Digging potatoes is not always just digging potatoes.
We don’t grow a lot of potatoes. Twelve hundred feet of carolas for late summer and fall potatoes and six hundred feet of red gold for early summer new potatoes. Both are creamy yellow fleshed varieties that help set ours apart from industrial commodity potatoes that sell for 20¢ a pound. Were getting $1.50 a pound and sell about a little over a bushel a week at farmers’ markets. When we run out shoppers ask for them and are sad when we don’t have them.
Since we are only growing a small quantity and getting a premium price for them, it’s worth the few hours a week I spend on my knees with a digging fork turning over the potato beds in search of the little gems.
Doing two things at once
When I walk out to the potato patch, I have learned to always bring two buckets, one for the potatoes and another for stones. I figure that since I’m turning over the soil anyway, I may as well toss the stones into one bucket and the potatoes into the other.
I have never looked at removing stones from my gardens as a necessary tiresome chore. Of course it’s good to remove them so your hoe blade won’t bounce around so much, and your tiller tines won’t wear out quite so fast, and kneeling in your garden won’t be a potentially painful experience. Removing stones does result in better and easier gardening. But these reasons are all narrowly focused on getting the stones out of the garden; they all say that once the stones are out of the garden the job is done, and the stones are a waste by-product of this operation.
A waste by-product on an organic farm? Perish the thought! If you can’t see everything as a resource, you aren’t really trying. Stones from my garden are never a waste product.
Once I have five pails full, I load them onto the tractor bucket and haul them down to the woods road leading to my sugarhouse, where they firm up the muddy spots and ruts. With just a few year’s rock picking from all of our gardens, I have made the six hundred foot sugarhouse trail easily passable by tractor and woods trailer. No longer is the journey as stressful to the tractor and tractor operator as it was previously.
Stones larger than my fist I set aside to add to our rock pile, which we will use for building our next slip-form stone walls.
Moving down the potato row I am nevertheless pleased when the potato bucket fills faster than the rock bucket. Yet I am getting two crops for practically the same work as one harvest.
Why isn’t there a Freeze Weeder?
Ever have purslane in your onions? Or galinsoga in your carrots? Or foxtail in your peas? In each of these all-too-common combos, the weed is frost-sensitive but the crop is frost-hardy. Reflecting on this led me to ask the question: Why not take advantage of this by using a “freeze weeder”?
To my knowledge, there is currently no such thing as a freeze weeder, but I don’t know why there isn’t. Think of it as a modified flame weeder. Flame weeders don’t burn the weeds, they just flash heat them to burst the cells and kill the weed. Flame weeders are used to eliminate weeds without disturbing the soil, since disturbing the soil encourages new weeds to germinate. Plant your crop, let the weeds germinate, flame them before the crop emerges. Flame weeders use propane tanks, either tractor mounted or on a backpack, to supply propane to a nozzle at the end of a wand, where it is ignited.
To make a freeze weeder, why not replace the propane tank with a tank of liquid nitrogen, forget the igniting part, and go down your row of frost-hardy crop frosting the row with super-cold nitrogen gas. Like a flame weeder doesn’t burn the weeds, the freeze weeder wouldn’t be freezing the weeds as much as frosting them. And if you’ve ever looked with joy at the dead galinsoga, foxtail, purslane or other frost-sensitive weeds on the morning after a frost, you can imagine how effective such a gadget could be. Why isn’t there a freeze weeder?
Your Community’s Balance of Payments
The term balance of payments is generally reserved for international trading. For example, we buy autos from Japan, and they get our money. We sell them soybeans, and we get their money. Our balance of payments with Japan is determined by totaling the value of everything we sell them and deducting everything they sell us. When the balance of payments is negative, it means we are buying more from them overall than they are buying from us. A negative balance means that we are transfering wealth from us to them. So the term balance of payments is an indicator of how wealth is being transfered. A negative balance of payments means an outward transference of wealth, an overall loss of our wealth.
It occurred to me the same is true of our households, communities and state. Each of our communities, however you choose to define community, has a balance of payments with the rest of the world, with neighboring households, communities, states and nations. Buying carrots from California? You are transferring wealth to a California farm. Using AOL as your Internet service provider? You are transferring some of your wealth to the AOL/Time/Warner conglomerate. Shopping at a local farmers’ market? You are transferring some of your wealth to local farmers. Anyone who spends money is in charge of transferring wealth; spending money is transferring wealth.
Of course it gets a bit more complicated. Shopping at Wal Mart means you are supporting Chinese factory workers, but some of your wealth also gets send back to headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, some goes to truck drivers, stevedores, commercial mariners, and some to the folks who work at the local Wal Mart store. But almost all of it leaves your community.
But if you bought those sneakers from the New Balance outlet store in Skowhegan, you have the choice of Maine-made sneakers, which means you are transferring wealth to a Maine shoe factory (and its higher paid workers). Most of your wealth stays in Maine.
There are thousands of such examples, one for every time you spend a buck, and when you stop to consider where you are sending your wealth, you come to see you are part of the balance of payments of your community. The neat thing is that the smaller the community you consider, the more obvious it is how you are affecting it, and the greater the affect you personally can have on it.
Get a weeks groceries at the farmers market and you have made a noticeable impact on the income of several farmers. You have transfered some of your wealth to people who not only live less than an hour from you, but who are dedicated to producing your food and practicing in right livelihood. You have enhanced the balance of payments in the community that is your foodshed.
Digging potatoes is not always just digging potatoes.
