What Potatoes Have Taught Me

The pilgrimage to the garden was urged on many years ago by a need to escape the inane chatter and blather of the theological sock puppets. I wanted to get a straighter story so I quietly took a back pew in the garden and listened. There have been many excellent sermons over the years; neither time nor blogspace is available to recount them all. But I will summerize a few of them here.

Did you know that as a potato converts its starch for plant growth, as soon as the tips of the vines reach sunlight they cease to convert the starch and rely entirely on photosynthesis? I've never read that in a gardening book, as if it weren't important. But it's a fact, one need only be observant. It only makes sense. The potato is native to the high Andes where, although tropical, the altitude subjects the potato to unpredictable frosts. It is only prudent of the potato to grow its vines by mean of photosynthesis lest they be nipped off by frost. Then it will have plenty of reserves to recover after the tops have been killed.

Potatoes taught me a lot of such things about diversion of plant resources, water conservation, pest avoidance, etc. For example, how do you poison a bug that eats poisonous potato leaves for a living?! You don't, at least not with chemicals. Best to foil them and avoid them. But the sermons of potatoes went far deeper than that.

The potato famine that led to the starvation of millions in the 1840's was a warning and a foretaste of what is going to happen to us because of monocropping agribusines. The curious thing is that the Spanish found the Andeans growing many hundreds of different cultivars of potatoes and yet only three cultivars made it to Europe and to Ireland only one. When the fungal blight particularly suited to that cultivar appeared, potato eaters were defenseless.

The tale is told that many generations ago a begnin king was concerned that as his subjects walked the stony roads and paths, their feet were bruised and battered. His advisors suggested that he decree that all the roads should be covered with oxhides to save the people's feet. The cost would have been enormous and the resources of the kingdom would have been squandered in the attempt. But a wise old hermit came forward and suggested that instead of covering all the roads with oxhides, the king should have the people cut small pieces of oxhides, strap these to their feet, and this the oxhide carpet would go along with them wherever they went. Thus came shoes.

As bizzar as this may seem, we have been doing the very same thing with our food sources. The Andeans had small terraced plots of mountian ground on which to grow their food. Some were wet and some were dry, some cold and some warm, some got the morning sun, some the evening sun and some got sun all day long. They cultivated a type of potato to grow in each of the many different types of biomes that were available to them. The potato that grew well in the moist cool plot that got sun in the morning did not grow well in the warm dry plot that got the afternoon sun. So one finds in the Andes to this day potatoes of every size, texture, shape, color, flavor because the agricultural land is what it is. Better to find a potato to fit the plot than force the plot to fit the potato.

Modern agribusiness does just the opposite. It selects one variety of plant and then tries to change the Earth itself to fit it. It drains swamps, floods deserts, poisons the plants, salts the ground, all in an attempt to cover the roads in oxhides rather than put on some shoes. And like our legendary kingdom, our resources are just about squandered outright in the attempt.

I haven't the inclination to change Earth. As well to attempt to change the moon for all the profit it will reap us in the end.