The Gospel of St. Spud

They’re Red!  They’re White!  They’re Brown!  The Gospel of St. Spud

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Brothers and sisters, there is no patron saint of potatoes.

I tried to find one for today’s sermon.  I wanted a cheerful, outdoorsy kind of saint, not one of your haloed martyrs but somebody in a cassock the color of dirt, a guy who likes his vittles and drinks whiskey out of a flask.  Or a female saint would have suited me fine as long as she wasn’t too dainty, just some great rollicking fat girl waving beer cans around as she crashes through the fields.

The Church doesn’t canonize people like that.

Personally, I always plant potatoes on St. Patrick’s Day, but I looked him up and he doesn’t fit the bill at all.  He ministered unto Ireland about a thousand years before potatoes got there, and the historical record says absolutely nothing about whiskey.

So I went through the roster looking for somebody who might fill in for potatoes in a pinch – St. Bernard, the patron saint of flasks?  St. Rotunda, the patron saint of fat girls?  But it doesn’t do to play fast and loose with a subject as serious as hagiography, lest future generations get their saints mixed up as has been the case with St. Elmo, now thought to be the patron saint of tickling when more properly he should be referred to as St. Elmer, the patron saint of glue.

So with no saint to help me, I come before you naked and alone to preach the gospel of the potato. 

Well, you know, not naked.  We gardeners don’t go in much for that kind of thing owing to insects and sunburn.  But the word “naked” prompts me to lighten my sermon somewhat by sharing with you a little story about my neighbor Jim.

            One morning, the doorbell awakened Jim and he rocketed out of bed, flung open the door, and bellowed:  “WHAT?”

            “My goodness,” said the two Jehovah’s Witnesses who were waiting primly on the doorstep, clasping their little pamphlets.  “Did we wake you?”

            “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” said Jim.  He had by then realized, but was too irritated to mind, what had been apparent to the Jehovah’s Witnesses all along, which is that he wasn’t wearing a stitch.  He is a large man and at that point he was an angry man, and in situations like that some people are nakeder than others.

            “Tee-hee,” said the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

            My point is that evangelizing is not for the faint of heart.  We proselytizers are sometimes ignored and sometimes ridiculed; sometimes, as in the case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, we are met with naked rage. 

Nevertheless, we keep rapping at your door, we keep handing you our pamphlets, we keep hoping that just this once you will open up your ears, open up your hearts, open up your closet and put on your clothes, and hear our message, which, in this case, is:

Grow potatoes.

Yea, I say unto you, as I do every year at this time, that there is nothing you can grow in your home garden that is more sustaining than a potato.  Nutritionists tell us we could safely live off a diet of potatoes and milk if we had to.  Potatoes have fed South America for 5000 years and after Columbus they began feeding Europe.  2008 was dedicated as the Year of the Potato to recognize the spud’s role in alleviating world hunger.

Furthermore, nothing is as easy or pleasant to grow.  Sowing potatoes is a happy roll in the dirt at this time of year, when it is too early to plant much else though every bone in our body yearns for the mud.  Harvesting them is like an Easter egg hunt for grownups.

Potatoes keep well without refrigeration and are just as good simply baked or boiled as they are in snooty French concoctions.  Deep-frying makes them delicious, as it does everything up to and including tennis shoes, but is, alas, not a wise choice for those of us represented by St. Rotunda.

But the nicest thing about potatoes is how cheaply and effortlessly they are propagated.  Take a seed potato from a garden center, or a grocery store potato that is getting long in the tooth – I prowl the gourmet markets to get different colors – and cut it up so there is an eye in every section.  The number of plants you can get from one spud is a miracle along the lines of the loaves and the fishes.

Then lay your sections about six inches apart in a fairly deep furrow, or cover them with a foot of hay as I’ve described so often in this space.  Plants emerge in a few weeks.  If they are nipped by frost, the sections obligingly send up new ones.  Harvest tiny tubers any time after the plants flower, or leave them until the vines wither if you want bakers.

And that, brethren and cistern, is the shining truth about potatoes.  Eating them will fill your bellies; growing them will gladden your hearts.  Let us now raise our voices in the potato hymn by songwriter Cheryl Wheeler, to the tune of “The Mexican Hat Dance”:

They're red, they're white, they're brown!

They get that way underground!

There can't be much to do

So now they have blue ones too!

For the chorus you just sing potato, potato, potato until people beg you to stop. 

Let me conclude my yearly sermon with these wise words:  Give a man a potato and he will eat for a day.  Give a gardener a potato and she’ll roll around in the dirt and drink beer, so happy it’s embarrassing.

END

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