It is really fun to harvest potatoes. It is ideally a two-person job: one person digs, while another person grubs the spuds. I prefer to grub.
We’re not far from a hard frost, and the vines are beginning to die back. Bob starts with a shovel and quickly shifts to a pitchfork. There are lots of potatoes.
Potatoes are a strange crop, with their poisonous leaves and fleshy lumps below the earth. This is a Rose Finn Apple plant with all its little rose finn apple potatoes attached to the roots.
Here is a German butterball plant, with lots of butterballs. Somehow it feels like you’re digging for diamonds, even though it’s only potatoes.
As it turns out, grub is a term for unearthing root crops that dates from the Middle Ages… so when potatoes arrived from the Americas, the word for digging them up was already in use.
grub noun, verb, grubbed, grub·bing.
–verb (used with object)
| 6. | to dig; clear of roots, stumps, etc. |
| 7. | to dig up by the roots; uproot (often fol. by up or out). |
| 8. | Slang. to supply with food; feed. |
| 9. | Slang. to scrounge: to grub a cigarette. |
[Origin: 1250–1300; ME grubbe (n.), grubben (v.); akin to OHG grubilōn to dig, G grübeln to rack (the brain), ON gryfia hole, pit; see grave1, groove
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oh yeah, lucky people have BASEMENTS ! Alice, I’d kill for a basement ! I need a new green home with a basement.