6-14-10

PREPARING POTATOES

MULCHING POTATOES

AMERICAN GOTHIC

WARRIOR ONE

OM

Learning to grow food is no fun unless you think about what you intend to cook with it. If you slave away digging a trench with the belief that you are only digging a trench, it will be drudge work.

Today we spent hours of backbreaking labor shoveling compacted clay soil in the potato patch. Potatoes grow best when the majority of the plant is underground; the more leaves that are covered, the more potatoes will form underground. You essentially trick the plant, and make it believe it has a long way to go to reach the sunlight. For every portion of the plant that grows upward, the root grows downward, and with potatoes, you want to encourage plenty of root growth. In order for the roots to grow big and flavorful, either the leaves must travel through plenty of soil up to the surface, or there must be plenty of soft soil for the roots to reach down into.

On this trip we have learned a few techniques to accomplish an ideal potato growing scenario. Back in Mississippi, first we prepared a raised bed for the potatoes to be planted in. A raised bed essentially is a long, cohesive mountain of soil. When you place a seed in the ground on a traditional flat bed, it's net elevation is zero. But in a raised bed, that same seed on ground level is sort of like an elevation of positive one foot. This means when plants grow in raised beds, the roots have more room and freedom for underground growth and expansion. Potatoes do really well in this setting because the soil under the leaves is deep and soft. But digging raised beds involves seriously strenuous shovel work. Here however, the potato patch beds are smooth, level, and flat, which saved time initially during the sowing period. In order to get the potatoes under mounds of soil now, we had to spend hours covering the plants with soil and mulch. It doesn't really matter when you dig your mounds, whether during preparation or once plants have bushed out, but at some point, to have good potatoes, you have to do the digging.

The main thing that kept us smiling and going through the tough work today was knowing one day soon, we'll get to eat these potatoes, or others that someone else put hard work into. What separates humans from many animals is our ability to imagine the future, and imagining a plate of warm crispy home fries was all we needed for inspiration.