Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [135]
Humans thwart them opportunistically, murdering the plant and robbing its savings account just when the balance is fattest. Carrots, beets, turnips, garlic, onions, and potatoes are all the hard-earned storage units of a plant that intended to live another season in order to fulfill its sexual destiny. As a thrifty person myself, raised to trust hard work, I feel like such a cheat when I dig the root crops. If I put emotion in charge of my diet I would not only be a vegetarian, I’d end up living on air and noodles like a three-year-old because I also feel sorry for the plants. In virtuous green silence they work as hard as any chicken or cow. They don’t bleat or wail as we behead them, rip them from their roots, pull their children from their embrace. We allow them no tender mercies.
But heaven help me, I eat them like nobody’s business. Root crops are the deliverance of the home-food devotee. Along with dry beans and grains, they bring vegetable nutrition into months when nothing else fresh is handy. Because they store well, it’s easy enough for gardeners to produce a year’s worth in the growing season. Some of my neighbors grumble about the trouble of growing potatoes when a giant bag at the store costs less than a Sunday newspaper. And still, every spring, we are all out there fighting with the cold, mucky late-winter soil, trying to get our potatoes in on schedule. We’re not doing it for the dimes we’ll save. We know the fifty-pound bag from the store tastes about like a Sunday newspaper, compared with what we can grow. A batch of tender new Carolas or Red Golds freshly dug in early summer is its own vegetable: waxy, nutty, and sweet. Peruvian Blues, Russian Banana fingerlings, Yukon Golds: the waxy ones hold together when boiled and cut up for potato salad; others get fluffy and buttery-colored when baked; still others are ideal for oven-roasting. A potatophile needs them all.
The standard advice on potato planting time is the same as for onions and peas: “as early as the soil can be worked.” That is a subjective date, directly related to impatience. I always get stirred up around Saint Patrick’s Day and go through my annual ritual of trooping out to the potato bed with a shovel, sticking it in the ground, and scientifically discerning that it’s still a half-frozen swamp. You don’t need a groundhog for that one: wait a few more weeks. We generally get them in around the first of April.
Potato plants don’t mind cool weather, as long as they’re not drowning. They were bred from wild ancestors in the cool, dry equatorial Andean highlands where days and nights are equal in length, year-round. They don’t respond to changes in day length to control their maturity. Other root crops are triggered by summer’s long days to start banking starch, preparing for the winter ahead. In fact, onions are so sensitive to day length, onion growers must choose their varieties with a latitude map.
Temperatures are not a reliable cue—they can rise and fall capriciously during a season, giving us dogwood winter, Indian summer, and all the other folklorically named false seasons. But no fickle wind messes with the track of the sun. It’s a crucial decision for a living thing: When, exactly, to shut down leaf growth and pull all resources down into the roots to stock up for winter? A mistake will cost a plant the chance to pass on its genes. So in temperate climates, evolution has tied such life-or-death decisions to day length. Animals use it also, to trigger mating, nesting, egg-laying, and migration.
But potatoes, owing to their origin in the summerless, winterless, high-altitude tropics, evolved without