smashing pumpkins 267for any reason be disturbed. Seed potatoes aren’t ready to plant until after
they’ve spent their allotted months in cool storage. I had assumed a spring
potato was a spring potato, but these I’d bought from the grocery in March
must have been harvested recently in some distant place where March
was not the end of winter. The befuddlements of a seasonless vegetable
universe are truly boundless.
If the potatoes in the produce section are already sprouting, on the
other hand, it means they’re ready to get up. They’re edible in that condi-
tion, as long as they haven’t been exposed to light and developed a green
cast to the skin. Contrary to childhood lore these photosynthesizing pota-
toes won’t kill you, but like all the nightshades—including tomatoes and
eggplants—all green parts of the plant contain unfriendly toxins and mu-
tagens. Sprouting and a tad wrinkly, though, they’re still okay to eat. Rolled
in a sturdy paper bag in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator they’ll keep
six months and more. But when I open our labeled bags of seed potatoes
in April I always find a leggy mess, the whole clump spiderwebbed to-
gether with long sprouts.
That means the wake- up call has come. We toss them in the ground
and hill them up. From each small potato grows a low, bushy plant with
root nodules that will grow into eight or more new potatoes. (Fingerling
potatoes produce up to twenty per hill, though they’re smaller.) The plants
have soft leaves and a flower ranging from white to pink or lavender, de-
pending on the variety. In the Peruvian Andes, where farmers still grow
many more kinds of potatoes than most of us can imagine, I’ve seen fi elds
of purple- flowered potatoes as striking in their way as a Dutch tulip farm
in bloom.
The little spuds in the roots continue to gain size until the plant gets
tired and dies down, four to five months after planting. Few garden chores
are more fun for kids than recovering this buried treasure at the end of
the season. We plant eight different kinds, plus a mongrel bag that Lily
calls the “Easter egg hunt” when we dig them: I turn up each hill with a
pitchfork and she dives in after the red, blue, golden, and white tubers.
For my part it’s a cross between treasure- hunt and ER, as I have to shout
“Clear!” every time I dig, to prevent an unfortunate intersection of pitch-
fork and fi ngers.