Saturdays in the fall often were spent doing chores that were intended to get the fields ready for the coming year. One of them was gathering and burning the vines from the tomato and potato fields. They would be gathered into small piles and when they were reasonably dry we’d burn them. Yes I said BURN-fire and smoke. It’s a no-no today.
For my parents, Joe and Anna, this was the method they had learned from experience, and in Agricultural school, which was important in controlling diseases that lingered in the vines and would be detrimental to the crops planted in those fields next year. It wasn’t a hard job and we kind of liked, as most children do, that we could “play with” fire but also had the responsibility of keeping an eye on them.
There was some fun involved, too. Besides finding and eating the occasional edible tomato that eluded the pickers, we could have tomato wars with the other leftovers. Ideally, you wanted a big one that was quite rotted to have the most impact on your target. Of course if they were “overdone” they would fall apart in your hand as you tried to throw them. It was sort of like a backfire. This was one time we could get quite dirty without a reprimand from Anna.
In the potato field it was a different scene. Very few of them were rotted and there were some perfectly good ones that were missed (perhaps deliberately) when we harvested them. Those we put onto the pile of vines before lighting it and came back later to feast on baked potato. Depending on the intensity and length of the “burn” they would often be black with burned skin but inside there was a well-done tasty potato. Ideally they would have been better with some butter, but that was hard to carry around in your pocket. Salt and pepper on the other hand could be carried and we had them with us. Of course we had to remember which piles had potatoes in them, but we usually found most of them, as we stayed in the field until all fires were out.
Burning vines isn’t practiced anymore and is considered illegal by some agencies. Spraying with toxic chemicals is supposed to be better, but I wonder about it.
