April 25

The season’s first harvest was gathered today across the road, and we’ve come to listen for this as a true harbinger of spring readiness.

The tractor moved slowly up and down the field, with front bucket lowered nearly to the ground, and Fred walked just in front, stopping occasionally to bend down and lift the crop into the bucket.

“Bang,” followed by another “bang,” as each was dropped unceremoniously into the filling maw. These are heavy and make quite the rapport as they collide with one another or the metal bucket sides.

Some call them New England potatoes, and this seems fairly apt, as each year a new crop of rocks of such size and larger are brought to the surface by winter’s freeze and thaw forces. It’s amazing really, particularly from this Midwesterner’s point of view, where our soils tended to be uniformly smooth and I imagine trouble free for the plow and harrow.

Here is just the opposite, and we frequently hear the plow bang against some unseen rock, making the till that much more work. Hence the early harvest, where at least those of observable size can be removed and placed on the field’s periphery.

This is after all the region of New England stone walls whose presence pays regard to a time when Massachusetts was more farm land than not. I imagine the work required two hundred years ago to hand cut the timber, clear the stumps, remove the stones by placing them as a wall, and plowing the new land, all by hand or oxen.

We have one such wall that runs from west to east along the periphery at the access road next to the house, down to the lower garden, then lower still until the forest turns, whereupon the wall cuts 90 degrees northward. I’m told it marks what was long ago an actual potato field – not the kind we see being harvested today.