A Spud Scheme For An Unsprung Spring

A recent life change has seen me building a new business as a media consultant. It's meant a lot of ten and twelve hour days over the last twelve months - mostly for very little return. But the business is moving out of its establishment phase and into growth mode.

Unlike my allotment.

The career change has meant that, for the first time in a decade, I haven't been gardening for almost a year - at least not on my allotment. This is just as well, as I've mentioned in recent posts, the soil was getting a bit tired.

And my old muckers up at the allotment complex -  my "comrades in farms" - tell me I happened to pick the very best year in living memory to stay away. The yields last year were abysmal thanks to unpredictable weather patterns, which have continued right into this year.

Here in Ireland we haven't had a proper spring so far this year. The first properly warm sunny days have only arrived in late April. Through all of my years with an allotment, it's been common to have a warm sunny period of four weeks or so around Easter which follows some weeks of growth before that - usually from around St Patrick's Day - March 17. It means the plants are usually well underway by now. But even the strawberries in my back garden are only just showing new leaves at the moment.

Alaskan March in Ireland this year ....whose is the fat and pale kid with the dodgy teeth?

Having visited my allotment yesterday (April 21) for the first time in a year, it was quite a surprise. The place looked and felt more like late February or early March. The ground was wet, cold and mucky and apart from a lush cluster of rhubarb, there was very little growth in evidence. To add to the problem, it's on high ground and therefore is normally a few weeks behind anyhow.

We've just had the coldest March on record. Weather experts say that the melting arctic ice caps are changing the behavior of the Jet Stream which separates cold arctic weather streams from warmer westerly weather for Ireland. This year the line did not shift until much later, leaving us with the colder conditions for longer. We're told this will be more frequent going forward.

There was an item on the news last night about Irish farmers importing hay from the UK because they didn't have enough silage left to feed their cattle. I don't remember this happening before in a country where we have to get up once a year to clear grass out of our gutters. If it weren't for a few clusters of grape hyacinths in the garden and the longer days, we wouldn't think winter had finished at all.

Cold, mucky and damp, no growth....spring is unsprung

And of course, it's at times like these that the council creates bother with its "special rules" for their leased allotments. Since the beginning we haven't been permitted to have sheds of any sort for tool storage and shelter in the rain. So I got soaked yesterday. One guy tried to get around this by installing a children's plastic "wendy" house, but they made him take it away. The trouble is that they keep adding to their list of "special rules." Their latest one is  - no more ground sheets permitted. This strikes me as being pretty ridiculous given that the use of sheeting or cardboard is an environmentally friendly way of keeping the weeds down and also for keeping the soil a little bit warmer to give us that little head start.

Many years over I've returned to my allotment in March and simply rolled back the ground sheets to find friable and ready to use soil which didn't require any digging. Now I'll have to dig the whole lot over every year.

Another council rule is that every allotment must be more than two thirds dug over by the end of April. Yesterday my soil was mucky and sticking to the fork in big clodden, tacky lumps. It's in no way friable and digging it in its current condition will probably damage it. But if I want to avoid a clatter of a clipboard, I'd better get underway at pace.

The other problem I have is that the whole place is covered in a thick carpet of scutch grass - great big six-foot long fronds of the stuff. This is known elsewhere as Couch Grass or Bermuda Grass and expands by throwing out long runners across the ground. On the good news front, the fruit bushes are looking to be in good shape, there was a big pile of rhubarb to harvest and a lone surviving cauliflower that was absolutely delicious for dinner that night.

Grape Hyacinths provide the only signals that winter is gone

So I have a plan. 

I'm going to cover most of the allotment ground with potatoes this year. First off, this amounts to some good old fashioned financial sense. Last year was so bad for potato farmers that the price of spuds has more than doubled here in twelve months. Potatoes produce more food per square metre (even in a bad year) than any other crop I can think of. So planting up with spuds will save me a decent chunk of change as well as providing plenty of food for the table.

The second reason for planting potatoes is that my ground has settled and become compacted after more than a year without digging. Potatoes have an effect of breaking up the ground and making it friable again. This is one of the reasons seasoned allotmenteers will often plant virgin ground up entirely with potatoes. It breaks the soil up for easier use the following year.

Then there's practicality. With less time on my hands I won't be able to afford constant weeding attention for peas and brassicas and onions. Once spuds get established, they pretty much smother out most other weeds. With the soil still cold and mucky, spuds offer a reasonably hardy solution to the makings of another bad year for growers.

Sprouty spuds to cover lost ground

Finally, when the potato plants wither back, the spuds stay cosily in the ground waiting for you to come along and harvest them when it's convenient.

Stupidly I paid E5 each for three bags of seed potatoes. I should have remembered my previous success with bags of plain old supermarket potatoes which went sprouty. I'd have gotten four or five times more seed spuds for my money. The pink red supermarket Roosters did especially well for us in 2011

Leaving spuds in a bright spot in your kitchen gets the shoots growing - what's called "chitting." I tend to cut them up into chunks with an "eye" root sprouting from each one. This means that each sprouty potato gives you four or five new potato plants. I plant them about a foot apart and then leave them alone to do their thing.

So that's what's what for the price of potatoes.

Why Stella The Grumpy Granny Needs You

This is Stella, Ireland's self styled "grumpy granny" from the website www.gm-moratorium.com. Here she is yesterday wheeling her young grandson off to sell him at the farmer's market because he wouldn't behave himself.


OK yes, I'm joking. 


Stella isn't that grumpy at all - except when it comes to the matter of GM foods. Right now she's in the process of making an official complaint against the Pat Kenny radio show for a recent item on plans to introduce GM foods to Ireland. Stella grumps that the programme has misinformed the public on a number of key issues relating to how it explained the GM food process -  and regarding its treatment of news of new plans for Ireland which seemed to have popped up out of the blue.

Stella Coffey is a very grumpy Irish granny

I'm no goose stepping greenshirt by any stretch but I find the recent news genuinely frightening - that Teagasc (the Irish semi state agri research body) is now planning to facilitate GM potato trials in Carlow and that the deadline for public objections to the EPA is only a couple of weeks away. 


And I'm not the first one to be taken aback at just how such a vital issue for Ireland's future has managed to lurk below the media radar until almost the very last moment.


But thanks to grannies like Stella Coffey - who miss absolutely nothing (you know the kind!)  -  the word is now being spread rapidly and the troops are being rallied to resist the GM monster's latest threats. But we have to act fast. On Stella's own website www.gm-moratorium.com she has a petition against this new initiative which I'd urge you to sign post haste. It calls for a five year moratorium on GM plans for Ireland. Stella already has collected 1,600 signatories. You'll see my signature on there, right after that of Darina Allen.


Also make sure you check out her presentation on the current Teagasc GM issue on Youtube:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czl0fR4xieo 

See youtube - and join the grandmother of all GM wars...

This is what Stella has to say: 


"Last Tuesday Teagasc announced that it has an application with the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) for a licence to grow GM potatoes at Oakpark, one of its research stations that is located in rural Carlow. You have until March 27 before 5pm to lodge a "representative" aka an objection. Remember, if Teagasc gets its way on this, the genie will be out of the bottle because there's no way of recalling these spuds when problems become evident down the line. It took 20 years for the subtle effects of DDT to become obvious - that's just one way Natures bites back."


"My grandchildren have made me realise, all over again, that we need to be wiser about how we use and abuse our world. GM food and crops scare the grandmother in me." And grumpy Irish grans do always have a way of scaring the rest of us into action so Stella might just get somewhere with her one gran campaign.

So why is it that the older generation are the only ones that seem to give a fig about our environment these days - while that once ultra politically active segment - the young adults do nowt but wander about pressing "OMG!" repeatedly into their smartphones? 

The last time we had a proper GM ruck over here was in the 1990's when gnarly campaigners turned up in Carlow to stomp GM sugar beet - leading the charge was the great self sufficiency guru himself, the late great John Seymour (who inspired the 1970's hit series "The Good Life"). Seymour, then a Wexford based smallholder, managed to get himself lifted by the rozzers for beet stomping - at almost 90 years of age! Another multi national tried again in 2007 and ended up securing approval from the EPA for GM tests, but the conditions were so stringent that they didn't bother in the end.

The late great "grump" John Seymour - pinched thanks to his bobby on the beet

Now Ireland's "GM Virginity" is in jeopardy once again. But why the fuss? What the hi de hay does it matter if we inject hippopotamus DNA into sweetcorn - if the end result is great big giant cobs of corn that thrive in wet conditions but don't attack fishermen?

Well if we can actually genetically modify and tweak our food plants in a completely safe manner to increase food quality and quantity then GM food would indeed be a truly great thing. But the big GM question is this: Can we really trust profit-driven multinationals (they're driving GM development) to tinker around with the genetics of food plants on a huge scale - when thus far we can only be certain that: (a) we don't yet understand the ultimate consequences and (b) we know that GM plants can freely interbreed with non GM plants? 

Such is the worry about GM foods that they are banned from many parts of the world. 

Genetic modification is the introduction of alien genes not naturally found in a species (animal genes can be introduced to plants or vice versa) with the intention of producing a desirable quality in that species. And though GM foods are not with us long enough (the first tomato became available in 1994) to truly evaluate whether they are dangerous, the fact that they can and do cross freely with other non GM crops suggests that if they do turn out to be harmful, we have, as Stella suggests, already let the genie out of the bottle.

OMG!! KEWL!! The kids don't care

There have already been allegations that early problems are starting to show. It is alleged that soy allergies have soared by 50% in Britain since GM soy products entered that market. There have been reports that shepherds in India have lost a quarter of sheep that grazed on GM cotton plants when none died after eating non-GM versions.

So let's ask ourselves some other questions: What has GM achieved thus far?  Have the GM food crops - so widespread now in third world countries - ended starvation in those countries as so many GM proponents have promised? Nope. Have they greatly increased corporate profits? Certainly they have. Have they increased the risk of a world ecological disaster on an unprecedented scale? That's the $64,000 question that we still don't know the answer to. 

In Ireland's case we're being told that a GM blight resistant potato would be our reward. But they're not telling us that we already have blight resistant potatoes - grown all over the world and here in Ireland which are not GM crops. The common spud variety "Sarpo" is just one of them. What they're not telling us is that these more organic blight resistant spuds aren't uniform enough in shape and size to fit into the processing machine that big corporations prefer to use to sort, wash and pack their spuds. So it's GM for the corporations not the farmer or the consumer.

Frogrange anybody?

Finally, and still on the commercial front, one thing Ireland does have left in these dark economic times is its green agri credentials. We are still the "green isle," our food grows in the best of soils and, generally speaking, by world standards, it grows in a healthy environment. That's why foreign buyers still place a premium on our produce.

In the long run we might be risking our children's and grandchildren's futures but in the short tem we'll also be throwing away our long valued quality agri reputation away with the loosing of the GM monster. There are enough anti GM people out there throughout our trading partner nations to seriously effect that reputation and damage our food exports.


If you live in Ireland, don't just place a formal objection to the EPA, phone your local politican. Email your objections to the Minister for the Environment, Phil Hogan at minister@environ.ie. If you live outside of Ireland and wish to contribute to the global fight against GM food, write to your Irish embassy to voice your objections.

Finally, I was also joking about Stella's selling the young fella - though Teagasc just might be selling all Ireland's children down the swanny if we let them get away with loosing GM here. I'm with the grumpy grans on this one.

Super Spuds, Sophia and The Sex Pistols

Last year a tabloid newspaper revealed that Debbie Taylor, a 30 year old hotel chambermaid from Essex had been eating nothing but crisps for ten years. Previously 22 year old Gina Gough was also reported to have been living on crisps - this time for three years (in her case it became an issue when she was hospitalised for gall stone issues). Before that again, another newspaper revealed that Faye Campbell of Stowmarket had spent fifteen years eating just chips.

Stranger still is that the accompanying pictures of these ladies didn’t reveal the spotty heffalumps we might come to expect from an exclusive diet of spuds and saturated fat, but mostly rather svelte and attractive types.

Giz a crip! Living off nothing but crisps doesn't create the expected heffalumps

We Irish have been here before - albeit without the saturates. Before the potato famine of 1847, a quarter of us (more than two million people) ate nothing but potatoes - usually boiled in their skins, salted and consumed with milk and sometimes mixed with wild greens. In all, around 60% of the populace used it as their main food staple before the potato blight and the resulting famine kicked the habit for us.

By the middle of the 19th century, Irish adults ate between 3.5 and 7 kilos of spuds a day. This happened not because we love potatoes, but because the land was held by the perfidious British invaders and they exported all the other crops from the country. All that was left for the disenfranchised Irish peasant was what he could grow himself on tiny slivers of land rented from the same British landlord. The spud was by far the most productive grown food available. A half acre could thus feed a family of nine or ten for a year.

Seven kilos of potatoes yesterday - 19th Century daily Irish diet

Generations of families could also do this because the humble spud is the nearest thing this planet has to being a “complete” food - lacking only calcium, which we supplemented in those days with milk and greens, the latter often derived from foraged plants like nettles or dandelions. Our famine, which saw a million starve to death and the remaining population reduced by half through emigration, was unique in history in that it was an artificially formed one. The country grew many types of grains and other foods and farmed beef. But these were exported to Britain. Only the potato failed in those years.

Giz a Crip! Statues in Dublin commemorating the Great Famine of the 1840's

An average serving of potatoes contains 21% of the daily recommended amount of potassium, 12% of fibre, 45% of Vitamin C, 10% of Vitamin B6, and 4 grams of protein; while only containing 100 calories per 148g (1 serving size potato). Back in the eighties, National Geographic magazine report explained how the spud was a “miracle food” with an extensive report/study entitled “The Incredible Potato.”

The report notes that by the early 19th century, our spud fueled peasantry were noted as being among europe’s tallest, healthiest and fastest growing. Elswhere in Europe bread and cheese based diets made people shorter and more prone to diseases like rickets emanating from vitamin C shortages.

So its quite easy to see how, that even despite the Famine, we Irish haven’t learned our lesson. Most of us still eat spuds three or four times a week. An unnatural percentage of the population profess to outright adoration and indeed when it comes to answering those “desert island” questions we’ve all been asked at some point in our lives, my own standard replies are: The Grapes of Wrath, Sophia Loren, cold milk, Never Mind the Bollocks and mashed potato with butter and salt.

And the sheer productiveness of the spud means it's easy to buy into the spud miracle when you have an allotment and you’re dealing with a plant that produces more food per square foot than any other. When it comes to world staples it produces four times more food than wheat or rice from the same ground which is why the potato’s usage is increasing in China and India in particular.

Peas from one bed: a pudding bowl full (after two hour’s podding); carrots from one bed - nothing again because of carrot fly; cabbage from one bed - ten or twelve heads, spuds from one bed - four stones - the weight of a child.

Sophia and mash equals paradise island

This illustrates just how ridiculously easy it is: In May I took one third of a bag of shop bought rooster potatoes (they cost a fiver) that had gone all sprouty in our kitchen and rather than chuck them in the compost, I took them up to Plot 34.There I took five minutes to plant them in a prepared bed which had been made up for celeriac, but was now empty on account of this year’s celeriac seeds failing to go all sprouty.

Last week, a tentantive pitchfork rummage yielded more than twenty perfect middle sized potatoes from just over one square foot of ground - enough for two dinners for two adults and two children in our house. At forty square feet of ground in that bed, that’s roughly eighty family meals for doing sweet F.A. And boiled in their skins with butter and salt they tasted absolutely supreme.

In what has been generally a bad year for produce, this year I played spud roulette and won - blight means you always take a gamble. This year in addition to the sprouty supermarket roosters, I planted a similar sized bed King Edward seed potatoes, another of Maris Pipers and a smaller bed of Lumpers, a heritage strain and the very spud that failed in the Great Famine - the one we’d all been living on. Back at home I’ve got spuds arrayed here and there through my raised rockery.

In my first year on our virgin allotment complex, most growers went heavy on spuds as they are known to “break up” new ground making it easier for planting other crops in subsequent years. The blight hit and most lost everything. Dithane, the typical copper based blight spray is not good for anyone or anything and in any case, the rain washes it off. And rain is plentiful in blight weather.

 I planted at least two middling sized beds of spuds the following year and ever since. Despite  getting blight about 50% of the time, I’ve been lucky to catch it early and cut the stalks back to the ground early in every infestation, thus preventing it getting into the tubers. This left me with small to middle sized spuds in those years but a crop nonetheless.

Potato Clamping for badly drawn types (see below)

This year for the first time I’ll be looking into “clamping” spuds to store them, if I can a hold of some straw. Leaving them in the ground until you need them is fine but I find that over winter about 40% get hit by pests including tunnelling slugs (how to they do that?) which seem to enter the spud via a tiny hole, eat themselves large and then they can’t get out again. These can produce a nasty surprise so always weigh your spuds in your hands and throw away the unfeasibly lighter ones or those that “rattle.”

Clamping involves digging a hole, bedding it with straw, heaping up your spuds on it, covering them over with straw and then covering the whole lot with earth. Because if you’re hell bent on eating nothing but spuds - you’ll need them to last the distance and store well. Otherwise it’s down to the chipper for you.