Back To Potatoes!

I never thought I would grow potatoes again! Not that I don't like them. I love them. I love them fried, baked, grilled, whole, sliced, mashed, skin on and skinless... It's just we used to grow them not for fun, but for food. It was a chore. As kids, we helped adults plant, weed, earth potatoes, pick them up, prepare for storage, etc. As students, we used to go to collective farms to help with potato harvesting and sorting. Most colleges in the Soviet Union sent their first and second year students to the farms following orders from local authorities. We knew we'd go to the countryside for a month if we got accepted in a college. Don't be quick to feel sorry for us: the education was free! Wait for the time when your kid will go to college, and tuition becomes a harsh reality. Then, a month of not-so-hard work in the fresh air with a bunch of their peers won't look so bad. We had fun! We worked, we laughed, we sang and had enough energy to go dancing after work. Nevertheless, we would gladly skip that duty if we could!


Back to potatoes. They are a staple in the Russian cuisine. We can not live without them. What do I remember about growing potatoes back then? We never watered them. We knew that they like sandy soil. The first question asked by people buying potatoes at the market was: what soil do you grow them in? Cultivation included one weeding - soon after the green tops would appear and two earthings - piling soil on the both sides of the rows.

On the sidebar of my blog, there is a picture of potatoes.



It's true what I say under it - I have no idea how one potato plant appeared on my raised bed. When I saw it for the first time, I was sure it was a potato plant, but where did it come from? I suspect it came with the soil in one of the pots with seedlings from the market. What was amazing was that I never saw it blooming! When I decided to pull it out to discard, to my great surprise, it had a bunch of good-size, firm nice potatoes!

Next year, there were two plants on the same spot. I didn't turn over the soil in that corner of the bed and probably some little potatoes got left over the winter and grew up!

Again, there were no flowers! There should be flowers! It's still a mystery for me.
This year, I didn't plan to plant potatoes. It happened that a Costco bag of fingerling potatoes was too big for us to eat fast, and they started to sprout.

Well, I just poked them in the free space on the raised bed. Now, I know it wasn't wise - too little soil to earth them.

But, we'll see what we get. Then, we had several red potatoes from the grocery store that started sprouting.

To throw them away? To compost? Well, after reading several posts about growing potatoes in bags, the boys and I planted them in a burlap sack and in a black plastic pot. Experiment!


The history of potatoes is amazing! Originated in South America, they didn't have an easy way to get into European and New World cuisine. Often called a ground nut, they were grown under the order of kings and emperors, and planted with guard enforcement together with some educational propaganda. In Russia, they are associated with Peter The Great and in Germany with Frederick the Great.

I like this story:

" In France the potato was imposed upon society by an intellectual. Antoine Augustine Parmentier saw that the nutritional benefits of the crop combined with its productive capacity could be a boon to the French farmer. He was a pharmacist, chemist and employee of Louis XV. Parmentier discovered the benefits of the potato while held prisoner by the Prussians during the Seven Years War. He was so enamored by the potato that he determined that it should become a staple of the French diet. After failing by conventional means to convince Frenchmen of its advantages, he determined upon a surreptitious means of making his point.Parmentier acquired a miserable and unproductive spot of ground on the outskirts of Paris. There, he planted 50 acres of potatoes. During the day, he set a guard over it. This drew considerable attention in the neighborhood. In the evening the guard was relaxed and the locals came to see what all the fuss was about. Believing this plant must be valuable, many peasants "acquired" some of the potatoes from the plot, and soon were growing the root in their own garden plots. Their resistance was overcome by their curiosity and desire to better their lot with the obviously valuable new produce."
(from http://www.indepthinfo.com/potato/history.shtml ).
Good information about potato history can be found here http://www.history-magazine.com/potato.html

By the way, we have baked potatoes tonight for dinner.

Vincent Van Gogh . The Potato-Eaters