A CROP FOR THE LAZY

By Robin Ford Wallace

            There’s something about my Irish blood that makes me ache, on St. Patrick’s Day, to malign the English, a cold and vicious people who crushed the Irish for 700 years, whose unjust and antiquated class system persists into the new millennium, and who even today eat desserts with names like “spotted dick.”

            Spotted dick is a boiled pudding made with raisins and suet .  I ordered it, out of sick curiosity, at a restaurant in England, and must admit it’s not as toxic as it sounds.  On the other hand, the English are rather worse.  Try entering an English eatery wearing blue jeans, accepted American garb for all occasions including burial, and you will gain new appreciation for the terms “cold” and “vicious.”

So this St. Patrick’s Day, in celebrating my Irish blood and American birth, I may raise a glass of green beer to the happy fact that both peoples eventually wrested their independence from this nation of sartorially snobbish suet eaters.  A country silly enough to require evening dress for the consumption of a food that sounds like a venereal disease is not one that may feasibly entertain ambitions of empire.

            Another thing St. Patrick’s Day makes me want to do is plant potatoes, a crop that is historically significant to our Irish ancestors and enormously popular among modern Americans – statistically, we each eat 126 pounds yearly.  Even given that some of this poundage is consumed in a crisp form out of foil packets, that’s a lot of spuds.  

            People often tell me, “I’d garden except I don’t have the time.”  I have noticed that this usually translates to:  “I’d rather spend my evenings eating crisp things from a foil packet in front of the television.”  To these people I reply:  Grow spuds.  The potato is your botanical soulmate and you can raise a fine crop without leaving the sofa more than twice.

            Some seed packets instruct us, with a straight face, “Cultivate ground to a depth of 12 inches.  Finely pulverize soil.  Adjust Ph.”  It is natural that such instructions should send couch potatoes scuttling back to the safety of their furniture.

            But to grow spuds with the Ruth Stout method I have described in this space, it is only necessary to place potatoes on unprepared ground – grass, weeds, whatever – and dump a foot of hay on them.  The thick mulch kills weeds, the potato plants push right up through, and bingo, you are growing a staple crop while breaking wind lethargically into the cushions..

            This is not rocket science.  If you plant potatoes whole, they will grow.  If you cut them into quarters, they will still grow.  I have grown baking-sizes spuds from peelings, by accident.  And if you start too early and the plants are killed by frost, the seed potatoes will send up new ones.  

            As the hay compacts, you may find it expedient to waddle out and throw another armload on.  Exposure to sunlight produces solanine, a toxin, and causes potatoes to turn an ugly green.  But if your butt is so velcroed to the upholstery you can’t get up, most of your spuds will be fine anyway.  This is a crop that thrives on benign neglect.

Corn, if we are to believe the literature, must be picked within minutes of attaining maturity, and then you have something like 30 seconds to cook it before the sugar begins turning to starch.  I don’t grow it anymore because I can’t stand the stress.

The potato, by contrast, doesn’t much care when you harvest it.  Like the couch potato, it just lies around getting bigger.  Any time after the plants flower, you can go out during a commercial and collect tiny, delicious “new” potatoes.  But if Gilligan’s in a pickle and you can’t tear yourself away, wait a few weeks and the potatoes will be medium-sized; wait a few more and they’ll be bakers.

The only hard-and-fast rule is to harvest potatoes while you still know where they are.  Whether because of bugs – just shake your head sadly, they won’t really hurt the tubers – or simple age, the vines eventually wither, and if you don’t dig before they disappear entirely you may not be able to locate the potatoes when you do finally heave into action.

However, if you’re such a sorry sack-o that you still haven’t dug when the fall lineup starts in September, you’re still okay.  Your unharvested potatoes will send up shoots next spring and you’ll have a crack at a new crop.

After harvest, no frantic activity is required to preserve potatoes.  They are content to lounge unrefrigerated around the kitchen for months.  Mash the last of your June crop at Thanksgiving, or yell for your mom to while you watch football.

Not that it is necessary to expend that much energy.  New potatoes are better boiled unpeeled, and to bake an older one you just pierce it with a fork, stick it in the oven, and forget it while you channel surf.

I rest my case.  If, after all this, you can think of a reason not to grow spuds, you can probably also think of a reason why civilized nations should eat boiled suet.

Otherwise, please join me in celebrating St. Patrick’s by planting potatoes.

There is no dress code.

END

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

Sex, Lies and Potatoes

     This was published probably in 2006 or 2007.  It's going to make my brother Frank hoppin' mad, but the chronicles of Bob would be criminally incomplete without this classic title.  Anyway, how can you feel sorry for anybody who tells lies about potatoes? 

SEX, LIES AND POTATOES

By Robin Ford Wallace

            My brother Frank once told me a story about potatoes.

            He’d been packing up to leave from a camping trip at the Chattooga River one spring, said Frank, when he realized he hadn’t cooked the potatoes he’d brought.  On a whim, he cut them up and planted them. 

Sure enough, the next time he went to the river, his spuds had grown plants, the plants had produced a crop, and Frank cooked delicious new potatoes at his campfire.

            This site on the Chattooga is one where I still go myself whenever I can.  So after Frank told me the spud story, every time I camped there I would wonder where he planted his potatoes.  Under the trees where we pitch our tents the soil is rich and black, but there are roots and no direct sunlight.  How could a potato grow there?

            Down by the river there is plenty of sun, but it’s all rock and sand.  Besides, whitewater rafters take out there, which makes for a great deal of foot traffic.  Could spuds thrive in such an environment?

            Ten or fifteen years passed, and I would ponder this charming mystery every time I visited the river and every spring when I planted potatoes at home.  Then one day, for no apparent reason, the truth hit me so suddenly I spilled my beer:

            My brother Frank is such a terrible liar he should have sold used cars or sought high political office.  No potatoes had grown at the Chattooga, and I was a moron to believe him for a moment. 

            Frank probably developed his easy, pleasant style of lying as a result of his complicated love life, which at any given point includes a minimum, though by no means a maximum, of two female persons who are always called soul mates.  He has children on two continents by three different soul mates, and those are the ones I know about.

            He was married for about five minutes in the 1980s until his wife found him soul mating with an automobile dealership magnate, whose millions he did not reap because of the soulfulness of the girl who sold him his beeper, and I forget who outsouled her except it was probably plural.

            Women apparently find Frank attractive because he’s handsome, enjoys gourmet cooking, and speaks several languages, having gone to college in Europe because, at the time, he was engaged to a Swedish girl.  

Who had a sister.

            So Frank didn’t marry the Swedish girl; rather, he returned to the States in some haste.  In fact I believe there is now an international treaty in effect forbidding my brother to set foot in Europe, where in any case he would be as welcome as Hitler.  Philanderers, take heed:  Philander with someone other than the sister of the philanderee, or have your passport in order at all times.

Frank is now pushing 50 and still pulling it off.  Last time I visited him, little pastel dishes of seashells and potpourri upstairs evidenced the unseen presence of a sensitive and girlish soul mate, while downstairs a horsy, whiskey-drinking soul mate chased him around the house like in a cartoon, shouting things like, “Ah need me some kisses!”  And sometimes he talked on his cell phone furtively, in Swedish. 

So for someone like Frank, lying to women is a necessary survival skill, and I expect he told me the potato story just to stay in practice. 

I’m not really mad.  Frank may lie and he may be untrue to his teeming soul mates but as a brother he’s been rather fun; our family always has something to talk about at Thanksgiving.  And his example does provide a useful moral nudge toward honesty, which, though it may not generate as much interesting conversation, is infinitely less trouble to keep track of.

            But lying about potatoes is particularly perjurious because no crop could be more honest or forthright.  Plant them and they will grow.  Nurserymen after your buck will recommend that you use their seed potatoes, but for years I have grown much of my crop from elderly food potatoes and have produced baking-size spuds from peelings.

I think the reason I believed my brother’s story so long is that potatoes are such faithful performers.  They may not grow untended along scenic rivers but they will grow just about anywhere else with almost no trouble.  I plant mine on unprepared ground, under a foot of hay, at or around St. Patrick’s Day, on the principle that that is about the right time of year, and there is generally beer.  Schlepping a foot of hay is hot work.

        The potato plants come right up through the mulch, and if frost kills them, they come up again.  Forget them until they flower, after which you may harvest them at any stage.

         If you, too, like to start from food potatoes, now is a good time to stick them in the pantry and forget to eat them.  You can get the exotic yellow and blue kinds from Green Life in Chattanooga.

         The South Beach Diet has turned some of us away from the noble potato because it is unapologetically that regime’s worst enemy, the carb, but it is a carb that for centuries, thank you, fed entire nations almost single-handedly, and one that faithfully rewards the gardener’s minimal effort with amazing bounty. 

         Unlike a certain member of my family, I don’t believe in lying, unless it is funny, and I do believe in fidelity, horticultural as well as the other kind.  So I say, in the words of Matthew Arnold, more or less: 

        “Oh spud, let us be true to one another!”

END

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

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.

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.