Lliam ran the tractor over the garden plots before Blain and Evan worked them. He pulled the disc parallel to the rows to comb out the stalks. Then he went perpendicular to the rows so the individual discs could chop the corn stalks and pumpkin vines into lengths short enough that they would not wrap around the shaft of the rotary tiller.
Then he went back to the lumber mill and building project.
“Why don’t we just plant the potatoes over there?” Evan asked Blain, pointing to last year's potato-patch that the disc had fluffed up and leveled out quite nicely. In contrast, the field that had been planted in corn the year before was still in-the-rough, even after Llaim had tilled it both ways.
Blain had asked Sarah the same question. It seemed like make-work to plant potatoes, the first crop of the year, into the fields that needed the most work.
“Did you ever hear of the Great Potato Famine?” Blain asked Evan, sharing the info Sarah had given him.
“Maybe. Wasn’t that in, like, the 1970s?” Evan asked. For him there was no difference between 1970, 1870 or 1470. They were all impossibly long ago.
“Nope. It was in the late 1840s. Between starvation and people leaving Ireland, it almost emptied the country” Blain said.
“They planted potatoes in the same plots of land year-after-year. And they planted nearly all of their plots to just potatoes. A disease that killed potato plants came and there was nothing to break the cycle of disease” Blain said.
“For five years in a row, all of the potatoes in Ireland turned to slime before they could be harvested” Blain said.
“Big deal” Evan said. “So they didn’t have any potato chips to eat. Why didn’t they switch to corn-chips.”
Blain looked at Evan to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.
“They didn’t have corn to make corn-chips. You are missing the fact that maybe ¾ of the calories they ate came from potatoes…just potatoes and nothing else. It would be like me only letting you eat half of your breakfast and then expecting you to work all day without anything else to eat” Blain said.
Evan shrugged. “I still don’t see why it was a big deal.”
“Day-after-day?” Blain asked. “You would lose three pounds a week and would be dead in months.”
Now it was Evan’s turn to frown. “But you said there were still people alive after five years. How did THAT happen if they would all be dead in half a year?”
“Some of them lived in port cities and they could buy food brought in by ships. Others lived by the ocean and maybe they could catch fish or dig clams or eat seaweed” Blain speculated. “Others might eat grass growing beside the road hoping they could get some nourishment from it.”
“There were still rich people in Ireland. Poor people probably went through their garbage looking for scraps of food. Or they might steal grain from the barn that the rich people were going to feed their animals” Blain said.
“OK, I get the picture. We don’t plant potatoes in a field where we grew potatoes the year before because diseases would wipe them out” Evan conceded.
Evan was able to till ground faster than Blain could follow up with planting the potatoes. Sarah insisted that the rows be precisely spaced so there would be plenty of room for the tiller to pass between them. She also insisted that the plants be 24” apart within the rows so the potatoes would be large enough to make them worth peeling.
Evan shut down the tiller when he finished tilling the plot and walked over to Blain and asked “Where do you want me to till next?”
“I want you to help me plant potatoes” Blain said.
“But I like tilling” Evan whined.
“Nope. We finish this plot before we move on. Besides, you need to learn all the parts of planting, not just running the tiller” Blain said.
Sarah was very firm on planting the pieces of seed-potato with the skin-side-up. And since that is how Sarah did it, that is how Amira’s (and Walter, Abe and Evan’s) plot was planted as well. There were faster ways to plant potatoes. Blain had even seen a gizmo in Roger’s shed for planting potatoes but the pieces were not inserted at an even depth nor was there any mechanism that ensured they were skin-side-up. So they did it the slow way.
“I still don’t get why I can’t keep running the tiller” Evan badgered.
“You can, after we finish planting this field” Blain said for what felt like the tenth time.
“But what is the point of finishing before moving on?” Evan asked.
“Do you watch football?” Blain asked.
“I have a video game that I play. Why?” Evan asked, taken off guard.
“Do you get points for moving the ball to the five-yard-line?” Blain asked.
“No, stupid. You have to punch it into the end-zone or kick a field goal. Everybody knows that” Evan replied.
“It is the same deal with this patch of potatoes. We can put all kinds of work into it but it really isn’t worth anything, as far as feeding your family, until it is completely planted. Getting the ball to the five-yard-line isn’t good enough” Blain explained.
Evan grudgingly marked the rows of potatoes by placing a rock every 9th hill in case they needed to be tilled for weed control before the plants poked their shoots above ground.
Evan had just started tilling the next patch when the rain started...
---Notes---
Modern, commercial potato farmers plant much closer together than that. For "new redskin" potatoes or for potato chips they might plant as close together as 6" apart in the row. For those market outlets, large size is a defect and planting close together limits the size of the tubers to what the market wants.
For baking potatoes, they might plant at 12" apart in the row. Again, different markets want different sizes. Home owners might want smaller sizes that microwave quickly while restaurants desire a size that fits nicely on the serving platter.
Subsistence, low-input farmers will plant farther apart so each plant has a greater volume of soil to "mine" for nutrients and moisture.
Combining the wide plant spacing with the poultry manure fertilizer will result in rampant vines that sprawl and make tilling difficult. It will also result in very large tubers, many will be knobby and some of them will have a defect called hollow-heart.
The upside is that if they had been getting 1000 pounds of potatoes per 70'-by-70' plot they might get three times that with the additional fertility.