The GREAT POTATO ROLL Now this is the truth. In Tennessee, a neighboring farmer rolled endless fields of shredded cornstalks into round bales about the size of a big SUV. They were cow fodder, but he agreed to sell me some, so I brought them to our place by tractor, lined up nicely at the head of our market gardens. It was spring, and Bride and I were setting up the potato beds – about six of them, each 100 feet long. I don’t have a potato hiller and don’t want one because I’ve always had better luck hilling potatoes up with straw or leaves, not soil. It keeps the potatoes safe from stressful swings of dry and wet, and we’ve never had a problem with Colorado potato beetles since we began that practice I figured this shredded corn would make ideal mulch, so I cut open a bale (about 6-by-6 feet) and started spreading it across the potato rows with a three-pronged pitchfork. Hours it took me. Hours, I tell you -- for one bale Then out comes Bride, and we’re standing there leaning on a big bale, me sweating corn bits, and her studying the matter carefully. “What if we roll it out,” said she. “Roll it out?” “Sure. The bales are at the high end of the potato beds,” she says, “so what if we cut the baling twine, give a big shove and role those bales right down over the potato field?” I don’t give up easy, so I studied the bales to make sure they were rolled up in such a way that they’d unroll like she wanted. They were. My old ways were toast. So we cut the twine, leaned heavily into the first bale, pushed with all our might --and, sweet as could be, whup, whup, whup, that baby unrolled almost the full length of the potato beds. Another bale, and another, and we were done in about a minute, and went in for dinner (which she’d been cooking all this time). How do women do that?
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 22:16:05 +0000
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