School: Monknewton (roll number 9696)
- Location:
- Monknewtown, Co. Meath
- Teacher: Maighréad Ní Mhurchadha
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0713, Page 486
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Monknewton
- XML Page 486
- XML “The Potato Crop”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- Potatoes are grown on our farm. There is about an acre of land sown under them each year. My father prepares the ground. Sometimes manure is put on the land before it is turned up. The potatoes are sown in drills. The land is first ploughed and then harrowed and then the drills are opened with a plough, and that plough is called a double-mould-board plough. Wooden ploughs were used long ago. There is none of them in the district now. Spades are not made locally they are bought in a shop.
The potatoes for sowing must be sound and have a good many eyes on them. The potatoes for sowing are sometimes cut in the middle. The people help each other in sowing the potatoes, sometimes they help with their horses by ploughing the ground, other-times they drop the potatoes for one another. The people weed and mould the potatoes in the summer months. They dig them in the Autumn with a digger.(continues on next page)
- Collector
- Mary Alice Smyth
- Gender
- Female
- Address
- Dowth, Co. Meath
