Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [271]
Ian was carrying this substantial volume under one arm—Jenny had told me that he wouldn’t go near the potato field without it, lest some knotty question of philosophy or technique occur to him while there—and now flipped it open, bracing it on one forearm as he groped in his sporran for the spectacles he wore when reading. These had belonged to his late father; small circles of glass, set in wire rims, and customarily worn on the end of his nose, they made him look like a very earnest young stork.
“Harvesting of the crop should be undertaken simultaneously with the appearance of the first winter goose,” he read, then looked up, squinting accusingly over his spectacles at the potato field, as though expecting an indicative goose to stick its head up among the furrowed rigs.
“Winter goose?” Jamie peered frowning at the book over Ian’s shoulder. “What sort of goose does he mean? Greylags? But ye see those all year. That canna be right.”
Ian shrugged. “Maybe ye only see them in the winter in Ireland. Or maybe it’s some kind of Irish goose he means, and not greylags at all.”
Jamie snorted. “Well, the fat lot of good that does us. Does he say anything useful?”
Ian ran a finger down the lines of type, moving his lips silently. We had by now collected a small crowd of cottars, all fascinated by this novel approach to agriculture.
“Ye dinna dig potatoes when it’s wet,” Ian informed us, eliciting a louder snort from Jamie.
“Hmm,” Ian murmured to himself. “Potato rot, potato bugs—we didna ha’ any potato bugs, I suppose that’s lucky—potato vines…umm, no, that’s only what to do if the vines wilt. Potato blight—we canna tell if we have that until we see the potatoes. Seed potatoes, potato storage—”
Impatient, Jamie turned away from Ian, hands on his hips.
“Scientific farming, eh?” he demanded. He glared at the field of darkgreen, leafy vines. “I suppose it’s too damn scientific to explain how ye tell when the bloody things are ready to eat!”
Fergus, who had been tagging along behind Jamie as usual, looked up from a caterpillar, inching its slow and fuzzy way along his forefinger.
“Why don’t you just dig one up and see?” he asked.
Jamie stared at Fergus for a moment. His mouth opened, but no sound emerged. He shut it, patted Fergus gently on the head, and went to fetch a pitchfork from its place against the fence.
The cottars, all men who had helped to plant and tend the field under Ian’s direction—assisted by Sir Walter—clustered round to see the results of their labor.
Jamie chose a large and flourishing vine near the edge of the field and poised the fork carefully near its roots. Visibly holding his breath, he put a foot on the heel of the fork and pushed. The tines slid slowly into the damp brown dirt.
I was holding my own breath. There was a good deal more depending on this experiment than the reputation of Sir Walter O’Bannion Reilly. Or my own, for that matter.
Jamie and Ian had confirmed that the barley crop this year was smaller than normal, though still sufficient for the needs of the Lallybroch tenants. Another bad year would exhaust the meager reserves of grain, though. For a Highland estate, Lallybroch was prosperous; but that was saying something only by comparison with other Highland farms. Successful potato planting could well make the difference between hunger and plenty for the folk of Lallybroch over the next two years.
Jamie’s heel pressed down and he leaned back on the handle of the fork. The earth crumbled and cracked around the vine, and with a sudden, rending pop the potato vine lifted up and the earth revealed its bounty.
A collective “Ah!” went up from the spectators, at sight of the myriad brown globules clinging to the roots of the uprooted vine. Ian and I both fell to our knees in the dirt, scrabbling in the loosened soil for potatoes severed from the parent vine.
“It worked!” Ian kept saying as he pulled potato after potato out of the ground. “Look at that! See the size of it?”
“Yes, look at this one!” I exclaimed in delight, brandishing one the size of my two fists held together.