FoodTrust - Connections

It’s mid-November and I’m forking eelgrass that had washed up the Hillsborough River into the back of my truck. I was thinking about my 94-year old cousin Kay from Lot 11 in the western end of PEI. She said they too always banked their house for the winter with seaweed. I was talking to Grace Swan before Remembrance Day and she told me her father Frank Watts, a 1st World War veteran, wounded in battle, always seemed to be banking the house on Nov. 11th. She said he’d put down his hay fork at 11 o’clock and bow his head.

Because we’re an island, there’s always been an overlap between the sea and the soil. Eighty years ago most Islanders were farmers who fished a little, or fishermen who farmed a little, getting by as best they could on both land and sea. Mussel mud, fish offal, kelp, and even lobster bodies were mixed with animal manure to fertilize the fields.

As a girl Cousin Kay planted potato sets with a herring or mackerel for fertilizer, as did Arthur Hughes who farmed in Millcove ten miles NE of Charlottetown. Arthur was born in 1913, the same year as Cousin Kay, and he said the hard part was keeping the cats and crows from digging up the fish.

This spring one of my neighbours laid down several rows of eelgrass, planted his potatoes on top of the eelgrass and then covered them with a mixture of soil and more eelgrass. Best crop in years. I didn’t tell him it’s all been done before. What is different today are the potato varieties being grown. Who grows Jenny Linds or Blacks anymore? Where have all the Calicos and Early Roses gone?

“When Mum sent us down to the cellar to get potatoes for supper we always got white potatoes - (Irish) Cobblers or (Green) Mountains. Unless it was fish day -then we brought up the Blues (McIntyre)”, says Cousin Kay. “There were 3 bins - whites and blues for the table, and a bin of red potatoes to boil up and mix with oats for the animal mash. We’d grow 3 acres - red, white and blue. And everyone grew parsnips and left them in the ground all winter. They’d be lovely and fresh in the spring. Mum would put them and the potatoes in the oven beside the roast to cook. I never hear of anyone growing parsnips anymore.”

Something else almost erased from our collective memory are the starch factories that once dotted the Island.

“Malpeque for beauty
Darnley for pride.
Only for the starch factory
Baltic would have died.”

(Mrs. W J Harrington in “History of Baltic Lot
18″, compiled by the Baltic W.I.)

The Baltic Lot 18 starch factory is long gone - as is the one in East Baltic which was unique in being water-powered. The mill dam is still there across from the old schoolhouse. There were starch factories in Bristol near Morell, up the bay in St. Peters, and on the riverbank in Murray Harbour. The starch was used in the New England cotton industry as “sizing.” The last starch factory on PEI was run by Colonel Full in Hunter River, on the stream beside the train station. It survived until after the 2nd World War.

Some farmers grew a coarse potato variety called Star especially for starch, but usually they brought in culls of any variety. Colin “Doctor” MacDonald - son of the legendary Dr Roddie - was born in St Peters in 1898 and lived to his 100th year. Like some of the bigger farmers he grew 5, 6, and sometimes 8 acres of potatoes and took the culls to the St. Peters starch factory: “The factory didn’t go all the time - it was only when potatoes was cheap - and that was damn cheap mind you! I remember one spring there was an awful glut - potatoes weren’t worth anything. They paid us only 18 cents a hundredweight. Eighteen cents! But we were glad to get it to be rid of the potatoes.”

I just looked out the window - snow flurries. Better get the eelgrass out of the truck and banked around the house. One thing hasn’t changed - cold weather!

Dutch