Gardening Tips From the Swamp Thing

POTATOES:  GARDENING TIPS FROM THE SWAMP THING

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

Recently, a crossword puzzle clue sent me for a sad walk down Memory Lane. 

The clue was “hippie-chic footwear,” and suddenly I flashed back to a Saturday morning in 1970-something, when I was staring at an ad in the newspaper for a cool store in Atlanta that sold a certain cool kind of shoes that the cool people wore.  I positively ached for those shoes.  I thought if I bought a pair, I could be cool, too.

What was sad about the memory was not that I couldn’t afford the shoes back then, and it was not that I was now a middle-aged woman with nothing more exciting to do on a Saturday morning than the crossword puzzle.  What was sad was that I realized I had long ago lost that innocent belief that there was anything on the planet I could buy to make me cool. 

I’m just not the cool type.  My feet are too big and I spit when I talk.  I’m awkward, unpopular, a freak.  I am the Swamp Thing type.  While the cool people hang out at the cool places, I sit at home and bite the heads off chickens.

Somewhere along the line I became resigned to it.  Maybe it was after the time, somewhere in the ‘80s, that I tried wearing aviator sunglasses to a rock concert, resulting not in Coolth but in a degree of visual impairment highly detrimental to cocktail tables and sound equipment.  Did I mention that the concert was indoors, at night?

  More Coolth-seekers than your humble narrator have tried that one and it always looks like trying too hard.  Really I think the only way to get away with sunglasses indoors is to be blind, and seated at the piano.

Anyway, I have given up on Cool.  They put Geek on my little bracelet in the neonatal ward and I expect somebody will chisel it into my tombstone.

            Which brings us to this week’s subject, which, as I’m sure you’ve already surmised, is potatoes.

            Foods, like footwear, go through periods of being in and out, cool and uncool.  Sometimes it seems related to puzzling spelling.  Quiche was all the rage before people got used to the French, and arugula and edamame had their own shining moments before the dining public learned to pronounce them.

            Some foods can achieve Coolth by showing up in unexpected colors, like blue corn chips or green pasta, or by being seemingly inedible, like sushi.

            I’m not sure what foods are cool right now, but the potato at present seems to be the vegetative equivalent of the Swamp Thing. 

It was not always so.  Back around the time I was yearning for those shoes, nutritionists were ardently defending the noble spud from the ravages of the new low-carbohydrate diets.  The unbuttered potato, they said, was not only low in calories but also loaded with potassium and vitamin C.

But the nutrition people, like the class geek’s last friend in the seventh grade after she accidentally breaks wind in home ec class, have now turned their backs on the spud, mumbling treacherously about something called the glycemic index.  One book placed “white potatoes” on the same list of nutritional baddies as Twinkies and Sugar Pops.

Eat sweet potatoes instead, the books urge us.  They are higher in fiber and lower on the glycemic index.

They are also orange, and what my brother Frank vomited all over the back seat of our car when he was 4.    Thanks, but I’d rather stick to those chicken heads.

More to the point, I’ll stick to potatoes, which, by the way, were not always referred to as “white,” as in bleached and over-processed, like white bread and rice, but as “Irish,” a nice word evoking visions of leprechauns and whiskey. 

I can’t see how something you harvest direct from the earth and pop unprocessed into the oven can be mentioned in the same breath as a Sugar Pop.  In fact, I read once that you could live quite healthily off nothing but potatoes and milk.  The Irish did for generations, though probably minus the milk and plus the whiskey.

In any case, spuds are so easy and fun to grow I can’t resist raising them no matter where they rate on either the glycemic index or the Coolth chart. 

Usually I plant mine on untilled ground, under a foot of spoiled hay.  This year, unable to procure hay for love or money, I resorted to the traditional method, planting them in a trench.

Healthy green plants arise from the eyes of seed potatoes, and if you are raising them in hay you should add new mulch as they grow.  If you are growing them in earth, hill up the dirt around them to keep the tubers protected from the sun.

Potatoes may be harvested at any point after the plants flower.  At first they will be tiny “new” potatoes, but if you let them grow until the vines wither you will get your share of Moby Bakers.

It doesn’t matter whether you use seed potatoes from a garden center or elderly specimens from the Bi-Lo, and it doesn’t matter how small you cut them, and it doesn’t matter if you are a good gardener or a bad gardener.  As I repeat every year until begged to stop, I have grown baking-sized spuds by accident, from peelings.

And that, Dear Reader, is what I call cool.

END

       Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.