Potatoes
Rock n’ Roll veg of the week: Russian Blue Potatoes
It’s not quite black, but it’s close enough. And anything this dark and disturbing must be metal to the core. So this week’s winner for the Rock n’ Roll Gardening Hall of Fame is the Russian Blue Potato.
Russian Blue potatoes live up to their name- they really are from Russia, although, like all potatoes, they originated in South America. They’re an heirloom variety which means they’re totally old school and not genetically modified.
If you can find them at the market or buy seed to grow you own, they make for some fucked-up looking mashed potatoes. This is a great prank to pull on your family at Thanksgiving: Your parents won’t say a thing because they’ll assume it’s just an acid flashback, and your kids will squeal with glee because Barney finally got nailed with a blender.
These potatoes are a late season variety and don’t produce particularly high yields, but they are tasty and versatile , great for mashing and roasting. They also do extremely well as a baked potato-pair it with sour cream for a striking side dish.
Rock on potato lovers. Rock on.
Potato Berries
Oh yeeeah… what the hell are those?
For anyone that’s grown potatoes before, you may have noticed small clusters of bizarre berries that grow on the tops of your potato plants and look rather similar to little green cherry tomatoes.
Surprise, surprise- potatoes and tomatoes are actually related, hence the similarity in appearance, but these little berries aren’t tasty or edible like tomato fruit. In fact, they contain high amounts of solanine and are poisonous. So don’t leave these lying around for your pet Lab to nose up.
While there are varying accounts out there, it appears that these fruit produce what is known as “true potato seeds.” Each fruit contains up to 300 true seeds, similar in appearance to tomato seeds. To harvest, you need to wait until the berry is ripe then toss it into a blender with some water and blast it to liberate the seeds. The seeds should float to the bottom. Continue to soak them in water, similar to the process for saving tomato seeds, and then dry on paper towels for next year.
When you plant these seeds, they form little mini tubers that develop into robust new potato plants.
Most farmers and gardeners just keep a small stash of extra potatoes to plant as seed for next year- I keep mine next to my other stash, which means I usually end up making them all into french fries and have to buy more seed potatoes again next year.
With true potato seeds however, you can tailor your crop by selecting for certain characteristics (so choose fruit from the best performing plants) and begin to control diseases like blight (tubers carry blight forward from one year to the next, so you can break this cycle). It also means you can eat your whole crop of potatoes each year and not have to buy seed potatoes ever again! Yay!
Yukon Gold potatoes tend to produce the most berries, I find, and have very high yields of potatoes each year.
Potato, Po-tat-o, Tomato, To-mat-o
What’s in a name?
Believe it or not, the similarities between potatoes and tomatoes don’t end with the song. They are actually part of the same family- the nightshade, or Solanaceae family- and they are closely related.
This means your tomatoes and potatoes are subject to many of the same diseases and afflictions, like blight.
Did you know that potato blight was the cause of the Irish potato famine in the 1800’s? True story. At the time, some thought it was due to static electricity from locomotives, or mortiferous vapours from a volcano, or divine punishment. Many still hold that it was a result of social, economic and political factors from the ruling English overlords.
I don’t know enough to say really, but I have suspected deadly volcano vapors being at work in my garden before. Or maybe it’s blight. Whatever.
Generally speaking, potatoes like boggy soil and thrive a bit earlier in the year when it’s cooler out. Tomatoes, on the other hand, like to keep their feet dry and thrive in the heat of late summer, so their growing cycles are staggered from one another, depending on the varieties you grow.
Having said this, hopefully you’ve planted your potatoes away from you tomatoes this year, as they are generally considered bad companion plants. It’s like your two warring sisters living next door to one another. You just know a fight’s going to break out sooner or later.
If your tomatoes get nailed with blight this year, your potatoes will be in danger too.
Cracked Pot Pix
