Up to my oxters in muck and sinking fast under an internet tsunami
The day was warm. The ground was hard. The manure was pongy. Planting spuds is hard work, especially the preparation.
The stones were legion. The hands were raw. The nettles were stingy. Here is one man engaged in raw struggle to wring food from the unforgiving land to feed his family. One man prepared to risk a sunburnt nose and dirty nails to earn a share of nature’s bounty.
The sweat was wet. The throat was dry. The back was aching. Okay, so our potato patch is barely the size of the average kitchen table. The Rolling Acres at the Manor are more correctly thought of as a playground than as a hot-bed of horticulture. And the family will always be overwhelmingly dependent on the greengrocer shop for their ration of roosters, their quota of queens.
The contribution of home grown produce to the household diet is marginal. Nevertheless, this is one annual ritual which I never shirk. It feels fitting for an Irishman to be clawing at the clay in springtime, preparing the way for the national crop. This puts me in touch with my inner peasant.
I was spurred into action by the sight of activity in the field up the road where commercial agriculture is king. The go-ahead clan who own this land are not folk who put their effort into low-risk, low-return activity such as grazing cattle. The grow potatoes.
Through the hedge, passing day by day, I glimpsed progress in their programme of ploughing and planting with interest. Hefty machinery was called into shape the brown earth into a pattern of drills, a pleasing vista of ridges and valleys. Every square inch of the field was sculpted to be part of this perfection, an age old task given a modern sheen of uniformity, at once immensely practical and aesthetically pleasing.
The end result was a sight of rare brown beauty. I returned home from admiring the work of the enterprising neighbours, determined to emulate their immaculate efforts on my smaller scale. A specialist contractor aboard a hulking great tractor can attend to hectare upon hectare in a day. How difficult could it be for me to replicate their neat tillage on my minuscule scale?
The answer was quite considerably difficult, as it turned out. For starters, the ground allotted turned out not only to be riddled with nettles and their insidious roots. It was also peppered with creeping buttercup, couch grass and a population of docks with roots dug down half way to Australia.
Having cleared as many of these intruders as I could lay a fork on, it was then a pleasure to give the earth a good digging. But after the joy came the tricky work of digging a trench, filling it with manure, planting the seed potatoes, filling in the trench and then mounding up the drills, with uncertain results.
The ridges were less than straight and certainly not of constant height, decorated with ungainly lumps of unbroken soil. Nevertheless, the end product was pleasing enough to prompt the taking of a photo which I put up on WhatsApp. Within minutes, before I had time to shake the dirt off my boots and run a hot bath, the internet was hopping.
‘Good job!’ was the message from the first correspondent, or follower, or groupie, or WhatEver a WhatsApp user should be called.
‘Dig the gardening!’ gushed another amidst a welter of emoji. Ho, ho.
‘Looking forward to enjoying a feed of mash!’ exclaimed a third. Of course, she will have to wait until September to tuck in but, still, it was nice to have my labours endorsed with such a worldwide wave of encouragement. It was noticeable that all those who posted these early comments were women. The female of the species seems constantly glued to their mobile phones and ready to loose off on WhatsApp, Twitter or Facebook at short notice.
It was not until the initial tide of euphoria had died down that The Uncles set to work administering a reality check. With their arthrickety fingers and aversion to new technology, they may be latecomers to social media but it appears they are catching up fast. ‘Is that a scene from World War One?’ queried one facetiously. ‘Certainly looks like a bomb scene,’ chimed in another. ‘Spuds? Duds!’ was the pithy message from the oldest of the lot. Bunch of geriatric ne’er do wells. A pity they are right.