What IS a handsome spud? Opinions vary as much as the personal criteria for 'what makes a handsome bloke?'.
My preference is for purple (for a spud, not a bloke), not just purple skinned but purple fleshed, the long and knobby kind i.e. Purple Congo, baked in their jackets till faintly crisp and eaten slightly warm in the hand, much like you'd eat an apple, or sliced when cool and served with olive oil, a touch of garlic and lemon juice and a little salt.
Lunch doesn't get much better than a freshly dug perfect purple potato salad, though there are those who claim that the long 'Pink Fir Apple' gives a superior result when doused in salad dressing, as well as making the most excellent chips. It is best to try several dishes of both so you can give an educated opinion.
Bryan's perfect spud, on the other hand, is medium sized, regularly shaped, smooth skinned for easy peeling and transforms into his nightly mashed potato i.e. the old fashioned Sebago variety, which also gives an extremely large yield.
Adore baked potatoes? Try King Edward, the emperor of the baked potato world. King Edwards need good soil, but they are reliably magnificent with a roast.
I also love Tasmanian Pink Eye, again best baked in their jackets. Pink Eyes are possibly the sweetest spud and sadly, the lowest yielding spud when grown in our garden - they don't seem to like summer's heat. They are too sweet to make good chips - they singe rather than turn crisp and light brown, and they aren't the best for mashing, either. But baked, roasted or in a salad they are wonderful.
We are so used to flabby, cold-stored spuds that those who don't have access to home grown ones never know how glorious a plain spud can be. I'm experimenting with growing a new low GI variety this year, too, to test its happiness quotient when grown in our garden, as well as its deliciousness.
Not that you need a vegie garden to grow a spud, which is useful, because we have run out of vegie garden space. This summer's crop will be grown in what I sometimes refer to as 'lawn' and the wombats regard as 'dinner'. I will dig a small hole in the grass for each spud, drop it in, replace the turf, then cajole Bryan into raking up enough autumn leaves (now decidedly brown winter leaves) to mulch them all. By September, when the spud shoots show through, hopefully the grass will be dead under the leaf cover, and the leaves will have decayed enough for the potato plants to grow. I will also need to feed and water generously - assuming we have water - for this method to work.
Does the 'bung it in the lawn' method give spuds? Yes. Does it give as many spuds as a well dug garden patch? Decidedly no. The easier it is for potato roots to form, the more spuds you'll get. In our heavy clay soil - undug - the roots will need to work for every centimetre of growth. But at least our 'lawn' is rarely trampled by anything heavier that wallaby feet. If the soil was hard packed the 'bung method' wouldn't work at all.
I've also grown above-ground spuds in boxes, or buckets with some drainage holes, and given commercially available 'potato growing bag' kits to kids as a gift. You place potting mix in the base of the bag, add a seed potato then keep adding compost and mulch as the plant heads towards the light. Potato roots - and the spuds - grow out from the stem, so if you bury the stem in mulch or compost or even 'hill' them with soil, as potato growers did for hundreds of years, you will get more spuds.
Above-ground beds are easier on the back than digging, but don't give as many spuds as an in-ground garden in a hot dry year. In a cool, wet year an above-ground spud patch in a warm sunny spot may do better than one in the soil - I haven't experienced enough cool wet summers to be able to judge.
For truly happy spuds, dig the soil deeply, mound the soil up to small mountain ranges every 60cm or so, and plant a seed potato - one certified disease free - in the hillocks. Make sure it is certified - you may spend months cultivating a crop grown from old spuds that have sprouted in your cupboard, only to find they won't soften no matter how long they are cooked, or have rotted in the ground. Tragedy!
Now mulch liberally, right up to the leaves. Feed and water, keep mulching, and dig up the harvest when the plants have entirely died back, or wriggle your hand into the soil to bandicoot a few 'new potatoes' from flowering time onwards.
All going well, you'll get about 10 times as many potatoes as you plant, but they will be larger than the 'seed potatoes' so your harvest should be more than x10 by weight. Plant in early spring in our climate, or early autumn - potatoes need 60-90 frost-free warmish days to mature, though you can bandicoot about 40 days after the first leaves appear.
The Irish - and many Europeans - managed to love for generations with little more than a potato patch and a cow. They didn't live well - and died when blights killed the spuds - but a potato-based diet can be a good one. A spud has about the same calories as an apple, and is arguably as good for you. I love them both.
And may your spuds grow every more handsome.
This week I am:
- Planting another plum tree, and another cherry. We actually don't have a shortage of plum trees, just a shortage of reliable water to encourage them to bear. This means we either have so many plums it is hard to give them away, or too few. But it is impossible to have too many cherries.
- Giving away silver beet. Why on earth did I think we'd eat the produce of 12 silverbeet plants? One or two would have been plenty. But the seedlings looked so sweet and innocent and tiny when I planted them out. Now they are lush monsters edging out the parsley.
- Enjoying the first large eggs of winter - only the bantams have been laying up till now. One bantam egg is perfect for glazing the tops of 2 dozen kumara scones, but you need two if you want them poached on top of your toast.
- Discovering that social distancing makes it difficult to give away bunches of jonquils. Silverbeet, or books, can be left in the letter box or by a fence post for someone to pick up. Though come to think of it, I suppose I could leave the flowers in a jar of water in the shade.
- Beginning - just beginning - to think about raising some advanced seedlings of tomatoes, mini watermelons, corn and pumpkins to plant out when frosts are (probably) over.
- Treasuring a small but very beautiful crop of post drought/bushfire camellias.
