When you do not have anything growing up but want, need and desire.........that everything is weighed on the scale of what is necessary and not what is your heart's desire, a person is forced to find things which most would scoff at.
I actually hated potatoes as a child. Boiled potatoes were a diet. I gagged at butter literally as on a plebian diet of nothing but high fat, any grease just was repulsive to me........and those tasteless potatoes were just watery awful.
My dad though around my 18th birthday, being on hard times, decided potatoes were to be raised. I did like raising potatoes though, if not eating those things. Potatoes were the one interesting thing in a bland life, as they were like Christmas in what one eventually was rewarded with as you opened the box of the ground from the summer's wrapping and found those tubers underneath.
The varieties that year were Kennebec and Burbank Russetts.........both which had little interest in me, as I hated boiled potatoes and baked potatoes were a dry version of ishy wet.
It was a good potatoe year though, and I had a hand cultivator my dad had picked up on some sale, so I was enjoying playing with that thing and keeping and immense garden of spuds clean. The crop was huge in hundreds of pounds and some very large potatoes.
Having to fend for myself I actually ate a Russet from the garden one day in microwaving it, and I was startled at how good the thing was as it was not that ghastly dry thing I had to suffer through.
Russets are when fresh, quite filled with vitamin C and fruity tasting.
I began to notice potatoes after this, and in working with the Canadian researchers actually started experimenting with crops of exotic heirloom status.
Marc Warshaw is a potatoe which is mottled red and white........is pretty like Rose, but does not do well in my region. I found numbers of potatoes which would grow and the research on starch, sugar molecules and chromosone structures all affecting me to either nourish or poison me, depending who had created the recent toxin or an earlier foundling of nutrition all developed a fascination me for this potatoe.
I love growing potatoes and thought I would in these hard Obama Super Depression times give some insight into them as they can actually if cared for will produce more food for you than any other crop in that space.
Forget about the Good Friday planting date. Potatoes will freeze and if you freeze their leaves, you will get nothing for your work. I have planted potatoes quite late and still gotten a crop as what is key to them is moisture, and steady moisture.
I have found that my goat manure pile is the perfect mulch for potatoes. I plant usually in May, allow them to produce their first leaves, weed the garden with a weeder hoe, and then mulch with the goat dung hay combination after a heavy rain, and that seals in the moisture.
Whenever I have to water, I use a regular garden hose in being careful to not clobber the plants, but I hose directly onto the stem base, and this really is what one wants as it goes right to the plant and does not spread disease to the weeds.
Simple rule is pick one day you water each week, and water on that day unless you get rain of 1 inch or more.
If you do not keep your water consistent, you will end up with hollow potatoes which is dry rot. Nothing is more disgruntling than to have a huge potatoe and find it rotten inside.
My kindly neighbors apparently have been sharing their potatoe beetles again, as I squish them or they will kill your plants. Be careful around the slugs as I got some bug juice into my eye last year and it burns like pepper........no wonder nothing eats those things.
I use Seven in my organic garden, as one must protect your crops and that does a pretty good job along with my squishing those cursed beetles.
Potatoes actually do taste different. I do not worry a great deal about storing potatoes as except for the reds, which make me ill in the Pontiac for example, do quite well in a plastic bucket with paper or a lid on top in a cool porch area........not going below freezing.
Potatoes are early, middle and late season. Early potatoes need early moisture and warmth. Midseasons need June rains and are finished by August usually. Late potatoes are a nightmare if you have beetles as you will battle the entire year with them for the crop.
The best tasting potatoe in my judgment is the Butterball which was brought here from Europe by the Ronnigers. It is sweet tasting and works in just about anything you can serve a potatoe up for.
I grow Alby's Gold or Agria as it is midseason and produces very big tubers and plenty of hen's egg sized tubers to sow next year. It also keeps very well and makes a very nice eye to sprout which is thick and well rooted.
It is a bit later in emerging than the Blues and a real weed I have called Siberian, but for hashbrowns topped with sour cream, it is delicious.
Oh and please forget the "tastes like butter" marketing of Yukon Gold, Butterball, Agria etc... Just because a yellow potatoe is yellow, does not make it taste like butter.
If you want wonderful hashbrowns, fry them in hog lard. If you want wonderful mashed potatoes, use heavy cream, real butter, with salt and fresh cracked black pepper. Potatoes can help in a Butterball, but all still need something to enhance the starch.
There is a horrid thing about potatoes in you will always stick your fork into the biggest one. I always dig back from the plant, and then work through the row as I get the first one dug. Lazy gets your potatoes stuck full of dirty fork holes.........put in the time and you will have potatoes to keep and not rot.
I always dig my potatoes and cure them by letting them dry in the sun for an afternoon. No washing as if you pay attention, God usually gives you a period to dig them in October which is dry so the potatoe will not be mud caked.
I sort mine as I bucket pack them in picking the hen egg sized ones which are best for planting next year, and protecting them as regrettably potatoes are getting extremely expensive to purchase in these heirlooms.
The best potatoe I ever grew was a variety called Purple Viking. It had immense crops and would tolerate heat and dry conditions, but I could not digest this modern creation, so I quit growing it. The more modern a potatoe is, the less chromosome structure it has in complexity. Modern potatoes might have only 12 chromosomes while the heirlooms might have 24.
Heirlooms do not always produce big crops, so be aware of that.......and sometime their potatoes are not that great tasting. The Europeans have a number of very good production and taste varieties I have not had problems with......so I grow them often.
I was eating a Slovenian Crescent and a Siberian deep fried a week ago and was amused to find the Siberian white and the Slovenian was brown. The Slovenian was converted to sugar and the Siberian was still starch. The Siberian is a most interesting weed variety, as it produces immense crops of smallish potatoes which I fry cubed........and in the early stage almost have a sour taste one does not expect.
They have though almost broken my potatoe fork in trying to dislodge the plant when I water them a great deal. They are like digging rhubarb roots.......they refuse to give up the ghost and come out of the ground.
The thing is children is you should have been doing all of this growing to know what you liked, what made you well and what grew in your area years ago..........instead of going around being Americans just thinking the world just happened. It all takes time and money to trial varieties to see what grows where you live.
Marc Warshaw in my area if I water them grow huge, but in Quebec they do this naturally as that is their genetic niche.
If you find the right varieties, get a good year, you can get buckets of potatoes from a few plants. 4 to 11 pounds is possible as I found with the Purple Viking...........and you will find your soil will flavor potatoes. I recall Yukon Gold having bitter skins on them in a trial I did in heavy clay soils.
I have given up on many of my heirlooms as it costs too much to water them and I became tired of digging dirt as many did not produce. It might interest you to know that most potatoe plants in the wild do not produce tubers.........they are complicated plants really and it is God's given miracle the ones we have actually do what they do.
So if you could find a variety or two which you should have done 10 years ago, in a good year 20 plants might produce 200 pounds of potatoes which would feed most families for the year.
I never bank on such things and have over 100 plants in the ground from Slovenian Crescent, Siberian, Agria, Russett and River John Blue. Some heirlooms I just have a problem giving up..........and I just do not have the time or resources to raise long season varieties like Butterball which produces a smaller tuber...........even if it is the best flavored.
I really recommend that people plant a garden with the old Dutch things we grew up disliking in potatoes, cabbages, carrots, turnips and beets, because those crops all kept in storage to keep your genetic providers alive and not dead Irish rotting in Ireland in potatoe famines.
You are going to have to eat something, and it would make sense to not be eating potatoes in the store sprayed with a poison to retard sprouting, which absorbs into the tuber and has you wondering why in the hell you have a gut ache all the time.
I have kept beets for over a year in my fridge, I had purple cabbage which lasted past this spring harvested last October in the same fridge. Carrots I still have in the Imperator variety in my crisper in zip lock bags from last fall.
Amazing thing is if you can things, they keep for years................that is probably a hint if you are an Obama voter, but then you probably should not be canning as you would probably blow your head off being stupid as your choice in Obama has proven out.
Well enough of this.
agtG
This blog has warned that Karl Rove is going to keep floating RHINO frauds to steal the nomination from Sarah Palin the way he was working with Mitt Romney to destroy Conservative Fred Thompson in 2008, so Obama would be elected in running against the corpse of John McCain.
