The art and artistry of tending the earth

ANOTHER LIFE:A WAKE IN our neighbour's house last week was full of fond remembrance and also, as so often in mid-winter, regret at losing another witness to the past. Bridie Ruane, warm and dignified, linked us to the Ireland of meitheal gatherings, of ceilidhing, of the ever-open door. She was a widow for two decades, surviving a husband, Michael, whose avid interest in life was a byword.

Here are a few of the things he taught me in my early “alternative” fumblings on the land: how to sharpen a scythe, and not to leave the scythe-stone on the ditch to get wet and useless; how to sow barley evenly on the soil, the grain in a bowl cupped in the crook of the left arm, the right thumb flicking it up from the palm in a golden spray; how to thresh ripe sheaves on a stone; how to winnow the grain on a breezy day; how to lock one’s grip, in shouldering a heavy bag, by tucking a pebble or potato in the corner ahead of one’s fist; how raking all the stones tidily out of a vegetable patch might be to throw out their store of warmth; how a great rock buried in the ground could be shattered by building a big fire of turf on it, then, after an hour or two, throwing on buckets of cold water.

Some of this was handed on from “the old people”, for Michael had lived through the great change: from horses to tractors, hay to silage, fork-spread manure to machine-scattered 10-10-20, lazy-beds to supermarket potatoes. At this distance from “the old people”, Irish farming history now merits a growing library of scholarly attention. Michael would have relished a new book about the most basic task of his forebears: building and maintaining the fertility of fields.

To quote first from the book’s foreword by Jonathan Bell, the Ulster authority on Ireland’s rural culture: “The revisionist movement in Irish history . . . has done away with insulting stereotypes, which attributed innate laziness, unthinking conservatism, and inefficiency to vast numbers of Irish small farmers. There is now a large, convincing body of evidence that these people were in fact ruthlessly efficient and ready to try any method that could secure a living for themselves and their families.”

The extraordinary range and application of their methods is the subject of Quickening the Earth: Soil Minding and Mending in Ireland, a scholarly, exhaustive and lively labour of love by Dr James F Collins, retired UCD lecturer in soil science. Its 500-odd pages trace the ways and means of enriching and feeding Ireland’s soil over many centuries, using every available natural material: clays, gravels, shell-sands, lake-bottoms, guano, burnt lime, stable manures, green manuring, street-scrapings, composts, old bones, many sorts of seaweed – “a level of investigation and experimentation that bears comparison with any modern economic or technical project”, as Dr Bell declares.

Despite the limestone bedrock that underlies the centre of Ireland, acid soil was the big problem of a rainy island. Even before burnt lime became the staple treatment of grassland, encouraging its earthworms to burrow deeply, draining and enriching the soil, lime was retrieved in the white marl under bogs and in lake beds and the sands and gravels of glacial eskers and moraines.

Around the coasts, lime came from shell-sand and “coral” seaweed (or maerl), but seaweed’s value as manure, notably for potatoes, has given Dr Collins an exceptionally vivid chapter. Until his book, I had not understood the intensity of local seaweed-gathering rights, or the extent of seaweed farming – setting out large stones off the shore on which to grow wrack for harvest. A low-tide photograph of such a “farm” in Mayo’s Achill Sound in the early 1900s, almost the size of a football pitch, is one of the book’s revelatory illustrations.

Good pictures, past and present, also mark another recent book by Jonathan Bell and Mervyn Watson, both now retired from their care of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. A History of Irish Farming 1750-1950 (Four Courts Press; web price €36) continues their long study of the island’s agriculture during the “Age of Improvement” and how this shaped the rural society and landscape.

Along with chapters on the changing crops and breeds of livestock (the book is supported by Bord Bia), I am pleased to see one on spades, since the back-breaking designs of so many garden-centre spades are one of my hobby-horses. The fact that, in 1830, a spade mill in Co Tyrone had 230 different patterns, for different soils and uses, should give one pause.

For my money, forget the short-shafted, broad-bladed spade with stirrup-shaped grip beloved of English gardeners: a plain, long shaft and a narrow blade, dished and flared somewhat at the tip (in a word, the Leenane spade), is your only man.

For more information on Quickening the Earth: Soil Minding and Mending in Ireland, e-mail james.collins@ucd.ie. The book costs €40; postage and packaging extra

Eye on Nature

I have the usual birds feeding on nuts and seeds. However, the male chaffinches sit in the tree and watch the other birds, including their females.

Sheila Thomson, Shankill, Co Dublin. After pair formation, female chaffinches become dominant and get priority at food while the male looks on.

A partially white goldfinch has taken to visiting the garden feeder. Only the wings have the goldfinch colouring.

Tony Dolan, Swords, Co Dublin. It is a pied leucistic goldfinch. Albinism is a genetic mutation that prevents the production of melanin in the body and shows white feathers and pink eyes. With pied leucism, melanin is present but is prevented from being deposited in some of the feathers and the eyes are dark.

Why do birds build their nests in a circle?

Kathleen Speight (7), Co Fermanagh. Birds build a nest in a circle because it holds warmth better and can be shaped more easily by turning around. However, the knowledge of how to do it is not planned, it is innate. They don’t know why they are doing it.

My daughter and I saw a buzzard in a field by the M50 roundabout, Ballymun.

Helen Campbell, Glasnevin, Dublin 9

• Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.