Jersey bennies, chitting happily in the greenhouse.
Legend has it that my ancestors, besieged by warring Maori, were forced to eat the seed potatoes.
I can see them in their wooden weatherboard house, not setting foot outside for fear of Te Rauparaha’s warriors, full of despair as they boil their last potatoes to feed their hungry children.
Who knows if it’s true, but it’s what was in my mind this week as I set out my seed potatoes to chit (grow shoots before planting).
Potatoes are such an enduring part of our food culture that we hardly think twice about them. They’re just there, bulking out meals.
Most gardening books say that potatoes are so cheap that they’re not worth the space and effort it takes to grow them – advice I’ve blindly accepted for years. But this year I’ve set myself a challenge; to become self-sufficient in spuds.
It started last year, when I planted one bag of Whataroa heritage potatoes in a spare bit of ground. After anxing about it for weeks (I do that), and consulting every book I have, they were finally planted in September. It was surprisingly easy; I dug trenches, put a few comfrey leaves on the bottom, put the potatoes on top and covered them over. As a precaution, I put a cloche over the top as protection against a late frost that never came.
Within a couple of weeks, the first bunchy green shoots were poking their way above the earth. I mounded them up with soil from between the rows to stop the developing tubers going green, and when summer heat left them almost horizontal on the earth, I sent a bit of water their way.
And that was it, until Christmas Day. Knowing with absolutely certainty that my potato experiment was a failure, I went down into the garden to see if I could scratch together a few potatoes for Christmas lunch.
And there were hundreds, or so it seemed. Plunging my hands down into the warm crumbly soil, my fingers curled around potato after potato. Real potatoes – knobbly and dirty and with a purple tinge to their skins.
My family is used to my roller-coaster emotions when it comes to gardening, but I could tell that even they were impressed. Potatoes are a man’s vegetable, and even the most picky child would struggle to call them yucky.
I boiled my bounty and served it with the traditional ham and salad and loads of butter and salt and pepper. I can honestly say that they were the best potatoes I’ve ever had. Firm, waxy and yellowy, with a vein of purple half a centimetre below the skin, they had a flavour that I can’t describe.
They were ceremoniously served again for our New Year guests and through the summer, and in late February I dug up the last of the crop and filled half a paper sack – enough for a couple of months when used judiciously.
Naturally, they have ruined me for mere mortals of potatoes. Since discovering the taste of heritage varieties, I’ve scoured markets and roadside stalls for bags of homegrown pleasure. We’ve eaten Urenikas and Kowiniwinis and a score of other so-called Maori potatoes, and all of them are better than the gluey, gray, gummy Ruas that I used to call potatoes.
Now it’s the depth of winter, no-one is selling homegrown potatoes, and we’re back buying them in sacks from the store.
And I’ve put myself in the silly position of boasting that I can grow all our potatoes for the next year. I figure we eat about 3kg a week, which means we need 150kg. In theory, you can get up to 20kg of potatoes from 1kg of seed, but I think 10kg is a more than realistic target. That means planting 15kg of seed, in about 100 square metres of beds.
Or at least I think so. That was my intention when I hatched this plan, back in February, but it was also my plan to have the beds prepared and the seed ordered well in advance of planting time (plans to plant a maincrop last year were thwarted when I discovered it’s impossible to buy seed after September).
I have made some progress; I’ve got 3kg of Whataroa seeds and 3kg of Kowiniwini in storage, and I sent my South Island sister a bag of Whataroa in return for a bag of the famous South Island early Jersey Bennes.
It’s those Jersey Bennes that are now sitting in an egg tray in the greenhouse, chitting away happily while I feverishly consult my books again to work out when is the earliest I can get away with planting them.
*Whataroas, Urenikas, Kowiniwinis and other heritage seed potatoes are available from Koanga Gardens, www. koanga.co.nz
Tags: gardening, gentleworld, Paparoa, potatoes, settlers
Good luck with those potatoes. My fondest potato memories are of digging them up with my grandfather. He was in the habit of spreading the kitchen scraps which included potato peelings around the base of his citrus trees as a mulch. Then, every December we would scratch around in the dirt and find dozens of tiny yellow waxy spuds that would only need a gentle wipe and a few minutes in boiling water before being served with a simple garden salad of lettuce, spring onions and a radish or two.
I like the sound of your grandfather, gentle1.