#potato garden

[wildrungarden]

9/19/23 ~ Sweet Potato harvest at school today. Some of these suckers were HUGE! I took home a lot.

Recipes to come 😇

#indoor garden #container gardening #sustainable gardening #vegetable gardening #starting seeds #grow organic #grow your own food #organic gardening #tomato garden #green witch #sweet potato #potato garden #harvest season #harvesting #vegetarian #veganuary #sustainable agriculture

[pinkapplepotato]

new tomatoes are sprouting!!! I know that's right!!!

#garden #tomato #potato garden

[forest-woman]

Heart shaped potatoes 🥔

Grown with love.

#cottagecore #cottage aesthetic #gardening #potatoes #food

[redjukebox]

I love these two and I love Grace’s Twitter

#grace safford #charlie slimecicle #I love these two sooo much #they are so real #I also love Graces cozy and garden stuff #I love her vibe sooooo much #rip graces potatoes💀💀💀💀

[sugarnies]

Potato Garden 👑

#mcytfanart #technoblade mcyt #mcyt fanart #mcytblr #mcyt #technoblade fanart #technoblade art #technoblade #soft art #soft artstyle #cute fanart #cute art #cute artstyle #soft fanart #cute artwork #garden #mcyt technoblade #potato farming

[andy-clutterbuck]

Years - The Ones Who Live - 1x01

#the Hot Suburban Dad at the Barbecue but he's a lil dorky #Rick Grimes #The Ones Who Live #towl spoilers #* #rg #nice gams grimes #as always #i'll still spill the potato salad and meet him in the garden shed #lacey shut up before you go off on a tangent #like he hasn't dated in a while™ and awkwardly offers to hang that wine rack you were talking about #but he's gotta go home and get his drill #*bad drilling joke* #*he blushes and coughs* #anyway i said shut up #bless all the lines on your face #they're beautiful and sacred #/ok going to bed more tomorrow

[deadpoets]

OVER THE GARDEN WALL (2014) Chapter Three: Schooltown Follies

#over the garden wall #otgw #otgwedit #cartoonedit #animationedit #animationsdaily #*mine #shows #potatoes and molasses has been stuck in my head since the first time i watched it #*mygifs #*250

[tkingfisher]

I have a question I just thought of. I remember reading that the potato is something that you can discuss at length. I'm curious about the Irish potato famine (as it's called by many people) of 1845 - 52. The potato blight killed a whole load of potatoes, and blight warnings are still a thing today. But... honestly, why? Was just one variety of potato grown? If not, wouldn't different varieties have resisted? The only thing I'm even remotely familiar with is Panama Disease, which is killing off Cavendish bananas because they're all genetically identical - was that the case for the potatoes being grown at the time?

Oh boy. Okay, this is a huge complicated topic and I can only do the Cliff Notes version and even that is absurdly long, but here we go.

The cause of the Irish Potato Famine were, in order:

A) the British

B) the British but moreso

C) still the British but also capitalism

and

D) monoculture

I am not nearly so equipped to talk about A-C as many, many other people, so let’s talk about D.

Now, the humble potato is frankly one of the most glorious products of agricultural science ever created, for which we must thank the indigenous people of Peru, who produced some goddamn geniuses at potato breeding (and also figured out how to freeze-dry potatoes centuries before Idahoan.) The Incas had literally thousands of potato varieties, every size, shape, color, growing condition, right down to sacred potatoes only for consumption by the royal family. They did seriously epic shit with a weird little tuber, a feat perhaps only surpassed by the geniuses who made corn out of teosinte.

Quite a long time later—by which I mean about ten thousand years after the potato was domesticated—the Irish were growing a potato variety called the Lumper. It was a big, coarse, ugly-ass potato which apparently didn’t even taste that great. Irish farmers had other potatoes that they liked a lot better! But the Lumper had three things going for it—it gave huge yields, tolerated nutrient-poor soil, and it didn’t mind wet feet.

(Wet feet is the gardening term for plants with their roots in waterlogged soil. Most potatoes do not actually like wet feet and will rot. But the Lumper was fine with it, which meant that basically you could grow the things in poor soggy soil, which large swaths of Ireland had in generous supply.)

Because of a whole lot of really abusive shit by various landowners, a lot of Irish people ended up dependent on the Lumper for their diet, and I mean dependent. You can live for a really long time on cow’s milk and potatoes if you have to, and a potato that would produce massive yields in crappy wet soil was a godsend. So you had vast areas that were planted with just the Lumper. (There are some reports that other, better-tasting potato varieties were grown for the landlords, but while the workers dug them, they were not allowed to eat them. I can’t speak to the truth of this or not, but it’s definitely worth looking up a full history of the socioeconomics of the famine, if you ever happen to be feeling too good about the world and want to be crushed.)

Unfortunately, the Lumper has one other significant trait—it is extremely vulnerable to potato blight, a disease caused by Phytophtora infestans, which is a weird little thing called an oomycete. It’s more like a fungus than it is anything else, but it’s actually in a separate kingdom called Chromista. (Currently, anyway. Taxonomy is where idealistic young scientists go to become old before their time.) Nevertheless, for our purposes, let’s just call it a fungus. (Also, Chromista is a great name for an alicorn in My Little Pony.)

P. infestans loooooves members of the Solanum clan, which include tomatoes and potatoes. This love is not returned. In a tomato, it’s usually called late blight, in a potato, it’s potato blight, no matter what you call it, it’s bad news. It likes damp, cool conditions, and of course Ireland is basically one big damp cool condition, so once the blight got established, it was in heaven.

Blight on a potato takes about five days from start to finish. This sucker is FAST. One day there’s a blotch on a leaf, next day there’s some whitish stuff under a leaf, then the tubers are suddenly turning black and mushy and stink to high heaven. You may even think you got a good tuber and put it in storage and then you open the door to the root cellar and the whole bin has rotted practically overnight.

The spores can spread by wind, and once it landed on a potato plant, all it needed was like two days above fifty degrees with high humidity, and it was off and running. And it gets in the soil. But worst of all, it lives in the tubers themselves.

Potato cultivars, for those who don’t know, are almost always a clone of the parent. All Yukon Golds are basically the same Yukon Gold. You pop a tuber off a plant, you pop it in the ground, it grows another plant just like the first one, asexual reproduction at its finest.*

Now, potatoes can and do set seed, but there’s some variation even in a seed with two parents of the same variety. Two Yukon Golds might give you Yukon Goldish. Mix up multiple varieties and you don’t always know what you’re gonna get.** (I have grown potatoes from mixed seed and thus made my own cultivars, it’s fun, but the results are wildly variable. Some don’t set tubers at all, some contain high levels of solanine.***)

If you want specific, uniform varieties that all perform the same way, you probably use the tubers. More importantly, tubers start growing right away once you wake them up, whereas potato seedlings can be finicky and often won’t do anything impressive the first year.

To make matters more confusing, the little tuber clones are referred to as seed potatoes.

Anyway, back to the blight. Everybody was growing from little tuber clones, which could be infected with the blight. This means that if your seed potatoes are infected with blight, even if they look fine, if you plant them, your whole crop is infected. The minute you get a cool wet day, the oomcyte wakes up and goes to town. And if you leave an infected potato in the ground, it infects everybody else—and if you’ve ever dug potatoes, you know that you always, always miss one.

Well. The blight came, it hit the Lumper, and it spread like wildfire. The Lumper grew in the wet conditions the blight loved, and was also really susceptible to it, so it was a match made in hell. There were potato varieties even then that were more resistant to the blight, but they were tiny islands and a sea of blight was washing over them daily, so they eventually succumbed. Even if you planted a different potato, if it was in soil that had previously held the Lumper, it was likely doomed.

This is the problem with monocultures. You plant all one variety and it’s susceptible to some particular bug, when that bug hits, you have no fall back position. And potatoes, being more or less clones, are even more vulnerable than most seed-grown crops, and this bug is particularly nasty and the spring of ‘45 was exactly the right weather and the British government was being particularly evil and ultimately a million people starved to death because of a perfect storm.

The Lumper still exists. Somebody turned up some heirloom seeds back in 2008 and grew them out, and what they got is probably pretty close to the original. Being seed grown, it doesn’t carry the blight. It’s an ugly, watery, kinda waxy potato that even its champions think tastes sorta okay, I guess. Cultivariable, one of the few sources I can find, says that in addition to not being resistant to blight, it’s not resistant to anything else either, and there’s not much point in trying to grow it unless you have long dry summers and no local blight.

And that is the saga of the Lumper, the blight, and why I personally always plant at least four varieties of potato.

* There’s some subtleties here, but for layman’s purposes, we’ll go with this.

** It’s actually way complicated, but this is already hella long.

*** Same stuff that makes green potatoes toxic. Super bitter, so you know right away it’s inedible and spit it out. We still refer to taste-tasting the new crop from seed as “the Potato Suicide Pact” but it’s not actually dangerous.

#gardening #potatoes #potato famine #long #agriculture

[bamsara]

Why does hospital food Taste Like That

#for context i am not the one for medical care but i have two friends in the hospital rn and im eating while we wait for their surgery #i have uh greenbeans sweet potato and rice #its like a garden #butnwithout the lettuce #sara shush

[monniponi]

Potatoes and molasses 🎶

#traditional art #watercolor #cottagecore #over the garden wall #otgw fanart #otgw #over the garden wall fanart #potatoes and molasses

[theunfairfolk]

tumblr has polls now so let’s settle this

#otgw #over the garden wall #potatoes and molasses

[wildrungarden]

I actually did grow potatoes this year, and for my first time… I’m really happy about the turnout! 🥔

#indoor garden #container gardening #sustainable gardening #vegetable gardening #starting seeds #potato garden #growing potatoes #sustainable #gardening 101 #vegetable garden #purple potatoes #grow your own food #grow organic

[pinkapplepotato]

in my gardening era

#garden #gardening #bell pepper #plant #garden lovers #i gently water the bell pepper #i gently rotate the pot #i lovingly stare at the bell pepper #potato garden

[verkomy]

I want to be a hobbit so bad :(

#I want to live in my silly little hole in the ground #and eat 7 meals a day #and grow potatoes in my garden #and drink tea and read books #and crochet warm blankets #and make pretty flower crowns #and dance and have parties with my other hobbit friends #and watch the sunsets #what a life that would be #the hobbit #tolkien #text

[abowlofpetuniasandawhale]

genuinely if you’ve never gardened i cannot recommend enough just grabbing a potato or sweet potato or whatever grows well where you are and throwing it into a bucket of dirt. in 1-6 months you get to go on a treasure hunt and then you can eat (!!) your treasure. 10/10 enrichment for the enclosure

#harvested my sweet potatoes and it feels so primal and good to just bury my hands in dirt looking for those sweet sweet calories #gardening

[wheat-privilege]

I grew these goth potatoes and I sliced into them for the first time today and they are SO pretty and now I want to show everyone.

The variety is actually called 'purple sapphire' so you can look it up, but they're goth in my heart.

#gothtato #food #potatoes #balcony garden #container gardening #I'm in the southern hemisphere so the season is different #personal gardening content