The Old Farmer’s Almanac says that it’s time to start paying attention to the potatoes. In my garden you can hardly not pay attention to them. The potatoes are reaching out and grabbing attention. Passers-by are rubber-necking the veg. The potatoes are so prolific, I’m afraid there might be accidents. It’s starting to feel like Audrey II‘s children are taking over my garden. When they start singing, I’m going to be concerned.
But seriously, these many weeks after you’ve shoved a few chopped up spuds into the ground, it is approaching time to stop avoiding the beds and start watching for signs of stress, attending to any 11th-hour needs they might have (short of blood…) — because the potato harvest is almost here. You might be able to dig the earliest varieties like Red Norland in just a week or so, though late varieties like Elba have enough time left that you may want to get in another hilling up for a top layer of new potatoes when they are ready in the late fall. However, the main-crop varieties like Yukon Gold and mid-season gems like Adirondack Blue will be mature in about a month.
Right now, all of your plants are sending everything they’ve got down to the roots to swell up the tubers. Your job as plant-assistant is to keep the bugs from making mesh of the leaves and to make sure the plants have moisture, but not enough to puddle on the leaves. Damp leaves will rot in one way or another. So make sure there is good air flow around your plants to dry up all that morning fog and afternoon rain. Then watch for them to turn brown.
This is the sort of depressing thing about most roots. They are done only after the plant has stopped photosynthesizing. Your potato beds will rapidly go from a lush, waist-high jungle to a sad, brown wasteland of crumbling leaves and contorted stems littered all over whatever medium you use to hill them. This end-season mess is the main reason I use straw, though straw is a mess in itself. But the straw keeps the soil covered so weed seeds are mostly kept out of the soil while the potatoes are going dormant and shedding their soil-shading leaves. Also, it’s much easier to fork up the whole mess and cart it off to the compost pile than to remove all the vines (because you have to do that or diseases build up in the soil) and then shift all the hilled soil around while digging the spuds. Often, with straw, you can just yank on the vines a little and bring up most of the attached tubers with no need to dig at all. Though digging is the fun bit!
There is not much in the garden that is more fun that digging for potatoes. Kids, who generally avoid all garden labor, or at least that which doesn’t involve spraying water, will take on the potato harvest with gusto. You sometimes have to rein in their exuberance with the trowel to keep them from slicing into the tubers. Or just don’t give them a trowel. Soil that is kept light and loose enough to make big potatoes is also easy to dig with just your fingers, like parting muddy water. It becomes a game of thrusting your hands into darkness, feeling around for something more solid, and then pulling out buried treasure.
But we’re not there yet. It’s just time to pay attention, not time to dig…. Unless you live in a warm climate and your plants are already brown — because the Old Farmer’s Almanac garden schedule is skewed to their New England home and doesn’t keep time well for the lower latitudes. So… hope you’ve been paying attention…
Meanwhile the rest of my garden also needs attention. The summer squashes are all in flower now. If I don’t watch them closely, they’ll go from flower to cricket bats in about ten seconds. Okay, it might take longer than that, but it sure feels like they become enormous the moment you turn your back on them. I don’t mind huge zucchini as much as other people do. I turn them into bread. And, if you’re not planting hybrids, the huge zucchinis are the ones with viable seeds that will grow plants adapted to your garden. So there are benefits. Still, I prefer the smaller fruits. Chop them into stew or ratatouille, pickle them in brine with dill and fennel, or just slather them in olive oil and toss them onto the grill. Summer squash are the essence of summer… probably why they’re named that.
Then there are the other icons of the summer garden, tomatoes! — the airy cousins to the chthonic potatoes. This time of year is one of perpetual tomato calculus. When do I pick the fruit? Do I wait until it’s at its most luscious fullness, ripe with juicy color? Or do I cut my losses before the squirrels ruin it, hoping the hard greenish globe will ripen on the windowsill? I usually opt for sub-prime fruit just so I can have something, but the lure of that one perfect summer tomato always prods me into leaving a few on the vine. And the squirrels usually eat them.
Actually, with squirrels and tomatoes, it’s not so much “eat” as “take one ragged bite and toss the ruined fruit into the dirt”. Or, because the squirrels around here have an evil sense of humor, “leave the ruined fruit sitting on the mailbox”. Which involves them carrying a ripe tomato across the road, over a hundred feet up the hill, and then up the fence post, where they have to balance it just so on the rounded mailbox, but also where the ruined fruit is the first thing that I see when I come out of the house. (I may be anthropomorphizing a bit… maybe…)
And then there are the weeds! Annuals like crabgrass and biennials like Queen Anne’s Lace are desperate to set seed before summer’s end. This time of year, they can and do go from sprouts to maturity in a week. I can pull the weeds out of the concrete walkways and from between the veg beds, carefully removing every last bit of root (much to the detriment of my fingernails), and they will be right back to thriving fullness as soon as I walk away. Or… again… that’s what it feels like anyway.
So there is a lot that needs attention on this lot. When I stop paying attention things happen. Bad things.
Which, of course, begs the question, why is it never the good things that happen immediately your attention wanders?
I suppose, because, as Michael Pollan says, “Nature abhors a garden”…
Today is the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene, the woman with the oil jar, the sole woman at the Last Supper, the prostitute who may or may not have been Jesus’ wife. I am not especially involved with this story, but I know many women are, monotheists and polytheists and atheists all alike. (Though it must also be said that most women are polytheists to some degree, as atheism seems to lack a certain color and accounts of the monotheist god are… from a female perspective… rather unsatisfactory on many points.) For many women, the Magdalene, from which we derive the names Madeleine and Magda, represents human female sexuality. Her name comes from a town on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, Magdala Nunayya, which translates as “Tower of the Fishes”, connecting the name to the watery deeps, and especially the power found in those depths. Perhaps it could even be interpreted as a blending of male and female if you carry the symbolism a bit further.
This is really not my thing, being far to anthropocentric to hold my interest. But I do find the watery connection with procreation rather fascinating, especially embedded in the very center of the quintessential patriarchic religion.
There are at least three versions of Mary in the Christian story. All three are associated with youth and sexuality. They represent the potential for procreation and at least the first, the Virgin, gives birth to human salvation — with no need of a man’s assistance. The second is Mary of Bethany, the lovely younger sister of Martha and Lazarus, who in myth perpetually sits at Jesus’ feet in a position of adoration. But… well, there are other ways to interpret that arrangement. The third, Mary Magdalene, is first encountered as a working prostitute who has the audacity to anoint the feet of Jesus with oil from her alabaster jar (yeah, you can just run with that one…). Instead of chastising her, as the Disciples seemed ready to do, Jesus calls her beloved and then keeps her at his side for the rest of his life.
When Jesus was gone, Mary Magdalene became his first and most ardent apostle. She wrote several books all of which were suppressed in the subsequent centuries. She developed her own philosophy of love and forgiveness. She crossed the Mediterranean, bearing the Cross and the Cup, and converted many to the Christian faith, or that version which came through her lens. The more cerebral and spiritual branches of monotheism or, rather, dualism — the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Cathars — all considered Mary their patron and founder. The Knights Templar carried it one step further and named her Mother, the Vessel of the Faith. (For a really fun trip down that rabbit hole, go here.)
There is a persistent myth in the northwestern Mediterranean that Mary Magdalene crossed the sea bearing more than relics. Many versions of her story claim that she was also with child and that the father was Jesus. Some even say there were multiple children from the union of the Magdalene and the Christ, and many of the esoteric branches of Christianity name these children as the blood ancestors of their faith. Mary is their Mother, symbolically and biologically.
Of course, this became heresy of the highest rank under the Romanized, patriarchic version of Christianity that took power in the latter half of the first millennium. These branches of the faith were brutally hunted to extinction. However, the Marian myths carried on in secret, becoming the powerful Occult, from which flows the Tarot and, in its late degraded echoes, the demonology of the Renaissance. Many branches of witchcraft — from the Roma magic of the East to the cunning folk of the West — also trace their lineage back to the Magdalene. And the entire Matter of Britain, the body of myth and legend that grew around Arthur, can be seen as a retelling of Mary’s story in Celtic guise. In attempting to exorcize Mary Magdalene and her loving, feminized Christianity, the Church failed miserably. I believe this is because Mary is far older and more enduring than the Church.
The name Mary is the anglicized form of Miriam or Mariam which means “drop of the sea”. It has additional meanings such as “beloved”, “bitterness” and “wished for a child”. But its core is the same as “mare”, the Latin word for “sea” from which also comes the English word for a female horse, “mare”, an ambivalent and fluid creature of night’s darkness and fire’s light. All of these shades of meaning and association show Mary to be a mysterious and powerful being of water, perhaps even chaos. She is the Potential that some call Ocean, the great stream that encircles and envelopes the Earth.
And this is the Mother, and possibly Lover, of God. Or inverted into the older interpretation, god is consort and son of the Goddess.
I don’t know if the Church intended all this. But if they had been trying to preserve the older goddess faiths they could hardly have chosen a more effective tool than to name the women most closely associated with their deity, Mary. I rather think some might have intended just that, and they are slyly winking out at us from within the fug and fog of patriarchy and empire. Look, they say, here is the goddess, the feminine Divine. She is still with us and we have not turned from her. We have simply named her son and consort our savior — because he comes from her. His blood and body are hers — and ours. We are born and remade within her. She is the Mother and the Primordial Waters. She is. And through her, we are as well.
But then… they might all have been as arrogantly stupid as this decision to name Mary might indicate…
And perhaps the Magdalene is just using them…
An interesting snippet of folklore from Brittany says that hay cut after St Madeleine’s Day (their name for Magdalene) will blacken. Horses will dislike it, but if forced to eat the blackened hay then the resulting horse dung will sink in water rather than float.
Sometimes one wonders who made these observations…
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 
Now I must learn more about the Essenes…
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