After a decade of planting gardens, we should be good at nailing the spring planting. We are not. March rolled around and we missed the potato window.
It’s the last week of March. While Jenny and I are figuring out chicken and pig feed at feed store while the boys rumage through the last of the seed potatoes in the bin out front.
Valentine’s Day to early March is the sweet spot for potatoes in North Texas. You want to get them in the ground 2–4 weeks before your last frost (around March 15). Heat above 85–90°F stops tuber formation, so they will stop growing by mid-may.
Potatoes are tetraploid, meaning they have four chromosomes. Compare with diploid, the more common two chromosomes. Therefore they are wildly erratic when producing from seed, and universally seeds produce less useful varieties. So you plant seed potatoes in the dirt and let them sprout themselves. They are clones of the prior plant and grand-clones of the plant before that and great-grand-clones of the plant before that, etc.
In 1871, a young man named Luther Burbank lived in Massachusetts. He noticed an Early Rose potato plant went to seed in his garden. He carefully cultivated the 23 seeds harvested,. One of these was fast growing, large sized, high yield potato. He propagated it and the results were sustained. Luther named it the Burbank potato, sold the rights for $150, and moved to California to be near his brother who had moved a few years prior. There in California, Luther Burbank continued developing plants, including the Daisy flower we know today, the first commercially viable plums, and ever popular freestone peach. The Burbank potato became the Russet Burbank Potato. It is the most common potato in the USA, on account of its excellent baking and frying characteristics. McDonalds alone fries up 2.6 billion pounds annually. Every Russet Potato today is a clonal-descendent of Luther Burbank’s providential seed propagation.
So we buckle down and get two lanes of the garden busted up. Yes, that means running a tiller to bust up the garden that laid fallow for a year. Yes, that means endless war with the bermuda grass. Yes, that means hours of management, most of which fell to Jenny, some of which fell to the boys. Yes, that means sunburns, ant bites, wasp stings, and ‘man that hoe was close to my toe’ moments.
Then a picture comes in from the wife, and it looks like this:
73 lbs of potatoes. From the 2 Lbs we planted!
We did ??? Red potatoes and Yukon Gold varieties. In our North Texas sandy loam soil, we planted in two rows 20’ long each. We took the small seed potatoes planted one every 12”, mounded dirt on top of the growth 2-3 times. The rain fall this year was sufficient that we did not go about watering them very often. Equal starting weights (1lb each) produced 27lbs of Yukon Gold and 46lb of ??? Reds.
Pumpkins are planted today to take over the growing lanes. We’re optimistic the annual plague of the Squash Vine Borers of Doom has passed and the winter squash can grow in peace. Also optimistic the squash vines will spread out and keep the grass from invading.
Potatoes need to cure/harden their skins to preserve for the next planting season. This is 10 days of 50-60f temperatures in a dark place with air flow. None of which is readily available in my house. Per the books and the Reddit’s, basements and root cellars are great solutions. In lieu of that Midwest fantasy, Jenny has conjured a solution with a big cooler, ice packs, and a potable fan, now utilizing our closet for the next week:
For us this week, potatoes are a reminder: I can follow the news of wars and rumors of wars, famine and injustice, outrage and injustice I can wallow in the sorrow and fear and imbibe the trauma as a constant firehose dump into my life. I can also take some time to go get dirty hands and knees, and be shocked by the irrepressible abundance the Good Father gives to his creation. We didn’t make these plants grow, we just made space for the sun and the dirt to do the work. Take care of what’s at hand. It’s good for the soul.
Speaking of mass suffering and famine, let’s talk about the Potato blight in Ireland in the 1840s. The Lumper variety of potato became the dominant monoculture potato of the Emerald Isle because of it’s high yields. Year after year after year, it became the custom of the occupied and oppressed Irishman to plant his plot of potatoes to feed his family. He would have a gentle loam from spudding up his taters. it would readily host the next round of potatoes in the broken sod. He could readily manure (fertilize) the soil there, and keep it lively and fresh, with the least work possible, and with these Lumpers, have the highest pounds yielded from any potato yet developed.
These Lumpers were all clones, consistently clustered with a lack of rotational planting for the sake of minimizing labor and inputs. The blight swept through the nation like a scythe, destroying the entire Lumper clone army. Partly as a result of this, I’m typing tonight about potatoes, because the Irish brought potato culinary culture with them as they fled to the USA.
We’re well past that problem in the modern world, right? High Yield Monoculture in the name of efficiency is a thing of the past, right?
We’ll be planting potatoes again in the fall. Dirty hands, clean taters. We already have our own clone seeds, after all. Maybe we’ll even add some Russet Burbank’s this time. Just wait till I tell you about the watermelon conversion rate.