Mash

New Potatoes - this year's experimental cultivars

It's strange what picks up traffic on the Internet, and in what mysterious ways search engines must work.  Looking at the stats for my posts on this blog over the 18 or so months that it's been running, stories that I thought might be of great general interest, or even which contained references to topical or notorious issues, didn't necessary attract more views than more mundane matters.  But a pattern does emerge; a strange and mildly disturbing pattern. 

All of my most popular posts concern...

Potatoes!

Bags of seed potatoes selected at Ryton Organic Gardens

Perhaps I am not streetwise enough to realise that, in some grimy sub-culture, words like 'spud' or 'tater' have another meaning though if so, one hesitates to speculate what it might be.  Let's hope that the true reason is that a veritable army of closet 'spud geeks' is lurking out there, working to bring the virtues of this starchy staple to a wider public and counter years of negative propaganda from the cynical and self-serving diet industry. 

And of course my sworn foes at the 'Daily Mail' have added 'chips' to their list of 'everything-you-might-enjoy-especially-if-you're-working-class-that-causes-cancer'*, while only the up-market Sweet Potato (an imposter unworthy of the name: not even from the noble Solanum family, for heaven's sake!) is listed amongst the good guys as preventing it (even if fried in lard DM?  I doubt that!).

Come on you reds!  'Red Emmalie' early maincrop

So what horrors might befall you if you ate pink mash, or purple chips?  Strictly in the cause of advancing science and not in the least to get incredulous looks and suspicious glances from fellow allotmenteers (though I do enjoy seeing that raised eyebrow and hearing the immortal words 'what the bloody hell are those, duck?'), I hope to find out soon.  Of course I've done the pink mash thing and lived to tell the tale, but this year's reds are new kids on the block, a rather elogated tuber called 'Red Emmalie' which will be up against reigning red champions 'Highland Burgundy Red' for taste, yield and slug/disease resistence.

And in the blue corner - 'Violetta', late maincrop

What will blow the minds of the allotment stalwarts, however, is the other funny-colour cultivar, 'Violetta' which, to no-one's great surprise I suspect, is a blue-purple shade all the way through!  Those will definitely cause some furrowed brows and either get me co-opted onto the committee or handed over to the Spanish Inquisition.

And for maximum blog traffic, I guess I could try crossing either of the above with 'Pink Fir Apple' to produce a potato with both an outrageously rude shape and a funny colour - if I succeed, there will have to be a competition to name it!

I've also got three different 'First Early' cultivars to test against each other - 'Swift', 'Cosmos' and 'Colleen' and a maincrop called 'Picasso' which is, against expectations with a name like that, perfectly regular and normal in shape and colour.  I can't help thinking someone's missed a trick there.  They're all sat out in the kitchen 'chitting' now. 

I still have to get some 'Kestrel' and 'Sarpo Mira' for my bulk crops, so I had better do that sooner rather than later or I'll miss the opportunity.  At Ryton, where I got my experimentals, they had already sold out of both of these but I imagine word got round about their usefulness during last year's slug-friendly, blighty summer and they will be much in demand.

Right, enough about potatoes for now.  On the basis that this post will be widely-read because it concerns taters, and in a shameless piece of self-publicity, here's the link to my novel again:

http://www.completelynovel.com/books/severe-discomfort--1

Unlikely as it might seem, the story does contain a couple of scenes with potatoes, both in their customary staring role in the 'main meal' test for lower rate DLA for care, and at a crucial point in a romantic sub-plot too! 

What more could you want, fellow spud geeks?


*Obligatory side-swipe at the Daily Mail newspaper.  Because it's got to be done!