Seed Planters

Luckily I happen to have done something on the very day I decide to start a blog. I can't promise this will happen frequently, but we can but hope.

Having said that, what I've done isn't that thrilling. As I'm at home for Easter hols, mum decided it would be a good time to dig up the garden and plant potatoes. Traditionally Good Friday is said to be the ideal day for this, but the Good Friday service left us a little too tired. Thankfully, actually, as we came upon a boulder-like slab of crazy paving concrete buried under one of the beds. Not entirely sure how we missed that when we first dug up the turf and prepped the ground last year but, there you go. We got it out and got the potatoes in, and I was reminded of two things. The first was Seamus Heaney's poem Seed Cutters which I wrote a (rather good) essay on last year; the second was Pieter Brueghel the Elder's painting:


Gloomy Day (February) 1565

Technically, this doesn't have anything to do with planting potatoes but it was the painting I thought of when I read Heaney's poem for the first time:

The Seed Cutters

They seem hundreds of years away. Breughel,
You'll know them if I can get them true.
They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle
Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.
They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill
Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes
Buried under the straw. With time to kill,
They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes
Lazily halving each root that falls apart
In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,
And, at the centre, a dark watermark.
O calendar customs! Under the broom
Yellowing over them, compose the frieze
With all of us there, our anonymities.

Heaney was most likely writing about the 'missing' painting from Brueghel's calendar series. The six paintings are meant to depict two months of the year each, I've seen differing opinions of which months are represented but the one posted here is January/February or February/March. I would've said Feb/March, pushing Hunters in the Snow to December/January. This would then make Heaney's imagined painting the April/May spot as all the others appear to have been filled. However, as the planting time for harvested seed potatoes (the ones that turn into proper potatoes - the ones I, myself, have sown today) is April/May so I forsee a timing issue. Pushing everything back one month would put it in the March/April spot which sort of makes more sense... Well, at least I've proved myself wrong with my own logic and not someone else's - that's always comforting. Having said that, seed potatoes are often harvested in January so maybe Heaney was the one who got it wrong. Yes, that sounds more likely.

On an unrelated note - Cambridge just won the boat race. Normally this would annoy me, but as their team was predominantly British and Oxford relied mainly on Canadians and Americans I think I can let it slide. There's that and I've got my heart set on that Cambridge PhD.