The First Potato

     I used to grow potatoes.  Lots and lots of potatoes.  In the Spring of 1992 I had about 7,000 square feet of new plantable ground in my garden.  I had spent the prior winter digging up what had been part of the horse pasture adjacent to the existing garden space.  In my lust for more garden beds, I decided that I wanted the land more than the horses did.  I expanded the wire fencing to include this new addition after laboriously moving the horses' watering trough.  Now I had an enclosed organic vegetable, fruit and flower garden the size of your average community garden.  I would be the new garden king of Mill Valley.  I envisioned myself, in my old McDonald's overalls, ambling proudly among my fellow gardeners telling them:  "Mine's bigger than yours!"

Google Earth's view of the garden at Happy Acres.  The long diagonal beds in the middle of the garden were my first potato fields.

A side view of the garden with greenhouse and cloches to protect tender heat lovers from our sometimes cool and foggy weather.  Some truly wondrous heirloom tomatoes have been grown here. 

       I'd heard that potatoes are a good crop to plant in new ground because as the spuds expand underground they break up the soil making the ground more friable for future crops.  That first spring I ordered ten bags of different varieties of seed potatoes.  When planting potatoes you start with mature potatoes and cut them up into chunks roughly the size of hen's eggs.  You dig a trench about eight inches deep and long enough to equal one foot per plant.  When I'd finished cutting up my seed potatoes I had thirty pieces for each variety; Alaskan Sweetheart, Peruvian Purple, Yukon Gold, Red Gold (my favorite until I discovered a cultivar known as "Cherries Jubilee"--so rare and so popular with fellow spud growers they were almost never available in the seed catalogues.).  So now I had five trenches sixty feet long and eight inches deep with a potato chunk every foot.

       I back filled the trenches and waited patiently for Summer.  I decided not to label the beds with the various spud types; I wanted to be surprised when I dug up the taters.  There are basically two ways to harvest potatoes (on a small garden-type scale).  For true, new potatoes, if the ground and the subsequent hilling up is soft enough, you can stick your hand into the soil next to the plant and feel around for the young growing spuds.  Pick as many as you need and the plant will keep growing and producing more potatoes.  When the plants finally came up that Summer, I was thrilled.  When they flowered I found out that red potatoes have red flowers, white and yellow potatoes have white flowers and the purple ones have purple flowers.  So much for being surprised.  Still, it kind of felt like an Easter egg hunt as you forked up each dead plant and all the spuds came tumbling out

I got my spuds from a little family farm ("Ronniger's Seed Potatoes") up in Northern Idaho near Priest Lake.  This seed potato farm was not far from Ruby Ridge where many White Aryan Brotherhoods and Neo Nazihoods had their strongholds.  These militias, at the time were pretty active and had drawn the attention of the FBI.  One unfortunate fellow by the name of Randy Weaver got caught in the cross hairs of the FBI and the US Marshalls.  You probably remember the story.  Sharpshooters shot Mrs. Weaver while she was standing in front of a kitchen window.  They also shot one of their sons and started a standoff that made national headlines and served to fatten the rolls of white supremacist militias.  My housemate, buddy and sometimes garden help mate was a jolly fellow named John Rosenberg.

      Johnny Surf (as some of us call him--don't know why...) was a truly awesome piano player, singer and songwriter.  He was also proudly Jewish.  One day when I was prepping the spuds for planting John, was making one of his sporadic visits to the garden.  I mentioned where the potatoes came from and their proximity to Ruby Ridge.  John put his hands to his head in vexation:  "Oh my God, you're planting Nazi potatoes!"  I assured John that neo-Naziism had not rubbed off on the potatoes and I'm sure the Ronniger family was too busy with their seed potatoes to get mixed up in any malicious militia mischief.  (we'll pause for a moment...).  Despite my assurances, the next time I came into the greenhouse where I kept my seed catalogues, I picked up my Ronniger Seed Catalogue only to find a huge indelible swastika emblazoned across the cover.  Oy vey...

Next Spring I bought several mesh bags of smallish organic potatoes from Whole Foods that were way cheaper than Ronniger's.  To be certified organic they must not only be grown organically, they can't be irradiated.  As radiation sterilizes them.  They won't grow eyes and they won't, if planted, grow more potatoes.  Since these taters were small, I was planting them whole; one per foot in my freshly dug trenches.  Our late, beloved friend Kate (RIP), who was a tenant of Happy Acres at the time, was down visiting in the garden.  Over time it became clear to me that Kate enjoyed watching me 'toil in the soil'.  She gained a certain smug satisfaction from the fact that I was toiling while she was merely watching.  She once tried to get me to weed the flower garden I had provided for her cottage by saying:  "Mikey, you should do it; you're so good at that stuff!"  So there was Kate watching me put my small potatoes into their trenches.  "How many potatoes do you get from each plant?  Like...one?"  "Kate, if I only got one potato per plant why wouldn't I just eat the ones I'm planting?"  "Oh yeah...duh!  Sorry...I was distracted; watching you toil in the soil in your grody denim overalls..."

So I got to thinking if we plant potatoes to get more potatoes, where the hell did the first spud come from?  I'm thinking aliens.  Don't ask me where they got their first spud; thinking that expansively is beyond my capacity...  The reason I was thinking of taters is because I recently purchased some quinoa, which I'd read, was a superior foodstuff; chock full of protein and all the vitamins and minerals from Argon to Zirconium...  I put down my magazine (the article was about how our new national quinoa craze had increased its price on the world market preventing subsistence farmers in Peru and Bolivia from buying it) and Googled "quinoa".  Up came a cheery web site promising to show me how to prepare and cook delicious and healthful quinoa in only twenty minutes!  I paged through the pictures and wrote down the instructions.  First step; rinse and thoroughly fluster the seeds in a wire mesh sieve (or words to that effect...) for at least two minutes.  This will remove the bitterness from the seed husks.  I brought down my wire sieve from the top shelf where it had been moldering away.  I held the sieve over the sink and poured the quinoa in...and watched it splatter through the sieve into the kitchen sink.  Pre step number one; make sure your sieve's mesh is smaller than the seeds...

        Gathering up what seeds were still in the sieve I poured them, bitterly unwashed, into the boiling water.  "Now simmer for fifteen minutes, remove from heat and let stand, covered, for five minutes.  Uncover, gently fluster with a fork and there you have it!  Fluffy, delicious, healthful quinoa!"   I followed the cooking instructions to a T.  After the five minute setting period was over, manned with my flustering fork, I popped the lid only to find a watery crimson slurry of quinoa seeds.  It seems the cheerful how-to-cook-quinoa web site was meant for white quinoa.  I had so thoughtlessly bought the red variety.  So instead of the quinoa, I was the one being flustered...  Soooooo back on the burner until the excess chicken broth water combo had vaporized.

      What was left wouldn't meet anyone's idea of 'fluffy' but a small spoonful proved to be marginally edible.  I poured the steamed quinoa into my tupperware container followed by chicken thighs broiled in teriyaki sauce topped off with steamed veggies.  This 'swill', as we call it, (personally I prefer the term "prison food"...) is what I've been eating for the last five days or so.  I had a bowl this morning.  I was wearing my reading specs at the time and looking down into my food I noticed that the quinoa had sprouted.  After all that I had done to these poor little red seeds, they still had enough moxie to sprout.  No wonder the Incas were so great.  Great until Cortez and the conquistadors cruised into town...

     Hasta la vista!  Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres