Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [136]
Now I know: potatoes have a preprogrammed naptime which cannot for any reason be disturbed. Seed potatoes aren’t ready to plant until after they’ve spent their allotted months in cool storage. I had assumed a spring potato was a spring potato, but these I’d bought from the grocery in March must have been harvested recently in some distant place where March was not the end of winter. The befuddlements of a seasonless vegetable universe are truly boundless.
If the potatoes in the produce section are already sprouting, on the other hand, it means they’re ready to get up. They’re edible in that condition, as long as they haven’t been exposed to light and developed a green cast to the skin. Contrary to childhood lore these photosynthesizing potatoes won’t kill you, but like all the nightshades—including tomatoes and eggplants—all green parts of the plant contain unfriendly toxins and mutagens. Sprouting and a tad wrinkly, though, they’re still okay to eat. Rolled in a sturdy paper bag in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator they’ll keep six months and more. But when I open our labeled bags of seed potatoes in April I always find a leggy mess, the whole clump spiderwebbed together with long sprouts.
That means the wake-up call has come. We toss them in the ground and hill them up. From each small potato grows a low, bushy plant with root nodules that will grow into eight or more new potatoes. (Fingerling potatoes produce up to twenty per hill, though they’re smaller.) The plants have soft leaves and a flower ranging from white to pink or lavender, depending on the variety. In the Peruvian Andes, where farmers still grow many more kinds of potatoes than most of us can imagine, I’ve seen fields of purple-flowered potatoes as striking in their way as a Dutch tulip farm in bloom.
The little spuds in the roots continue to gain size until the plant gets tired and dies down, four to five months after planting. Few garden chores are more fun for kids than recovering this buried treasure at the end of the season. We plant eight different kinds, plus a mongrel bag that Lily calls the “Easter egg hunt” when we dig them: I turn up each hill with a pitchfork and she dives in after the red, blue, golden, and white tubers. For my part it’s a cross between treasure-hunt and ER, as I have to shout “Clear!” every time I dig, to prevent an unfortunate intersection of pitchfork and fingers.
Even though the big score comes at summer’s end, we’d already been sneaking our hands down into the soil under the bushy plants all summer, to cop out little round baby spuds. This feels a bit like adolescent necking antics, but is a time-honored practice described by a proper verb: grab-bling. (Magazine editors want to change it to “grabbing.” Writers try to forgive them.) The proper time for doing it is just before dinner: like corn, new potatoes are sweetest if you essentially boil them alive.
In late summer we’d finished digging the Yukon Golds, All-Blues, and other big storage potatoes, best for baking. In September we’d harvested the fingerlings—yellow, finger-shaped gourmet potatoes that U.S. consumers have discovered fairly recently. I found them in a seed catalog, ordered some on a whim, and got hooked. The most productive potato in our garden is a fingerling adored by the French, called by a not-so-romantic name, La Ratte. (Means what it sounds like.) The name baffled me, until I grew them. When a mature hill