1925

New potato crop

A potato crop yielding a plentiful supply of good quality tubers is a happy augury for a bountiful harvest. The new potatoes made their appearance in the Galway market this week, and housewives declare that the quality is excellent, if the price – slightly over 3s. per stone – is on the high side.

Meadows are thin and – whisper it not in Gath – need rain. Other root crops like turnips and mangels need a little moisture, but we cannot get climatic conditions to order.

After Monday, the sun’s stay above the horizon will steadily lessen, but not until the first week of July will the difference amount to a quarter of an hour. Old Sol still lingers – Carpe Diem.

1950

More harm than good

The path of the pioneer is beset with difficulties, and often when he has achieved what he fondly thinks is a great victory, he finds to his dismay that he has also succeeded in stirring up trouble in some other direction.

The man who introduced the first rabbit to Australia, for example, may have felt quite proud of himself, but the people of that continent have no reason to be grateful to him, since year after year they must spend many millions to reduce the enormous rabbit population to manageable proportions.

One of the most modern ideas, especially pursued in the United States, is the control of the weather, or at least the artificial production of rain when and where it seems to be badly needed.

For years past it has been almost commonplace for specialists to go aloft in aeroplanes and, flying high above such clouds as are about, drop chemical substances which in due course result in rain falling. The process is far from infallible, but practitioners claim that they have a reasonably high pro- portion of successes, and that the farmers on whose behalf they work have good reason to like them. Now, alas, there comes a note of warning, sounded by a man picturesquely described in the American magazine, “Time,” as the “high priest of rainmaking.” He is reported as having declared that many of the commercial rainmakers are “woefully ignorant of the art,” and that, in fact, they are doing more harm than good.

His theory, in fact, is that the rain producers are producing droughts; he goes further and contends that the silver iodide particles may well drift away to places already contending with far too much rain and cause damaging floods there.

Pictured: Spectators line the Seanchéibh in An Spidéál to watch the Currach Festival on June 17, 1973.