Potato Heaven

Perhaps you have to be an allotment holder to develop this particular reflex, it’s the one that springs into action when you see the first potato flowers appear above the big green leaves and it’s a kind of manic grinning superiority. It stays on your face as you wander around neighbouring plots, noting that your potatoes are ‘ahead’ and only fades if you come across an allotmenteer who has more floriforous potatoes than you.

The humble spud may seem an unlikely cause of such joyous facial displays, but anybody who has eaten ‘fresh from the ground’ potatoes knows that there is nothing to compare to them – even artichokes and asparagus are hardly more wonderful than the taste of home grown spuds.

And the reason I’m going on about them is that we met somebody yesterday who might want some assistance on their plot – I’m not going to say too much about it, because I might jinx things, but one of the ways I measure the real nature of an allotment holder is their potatoes. Anybody can grow potatoes, there’s no trick to it, but taking pleasure and pride in your spuds is the mark of somebody who doesn’t have pretensions about allotments (which I once heard described by a truly pretentious woman as ‘my little potager’) and who knows the true value of fresh home-grown veg. The person we met yesterday bent over his potato rows and smiled the smile of a happy potato grower, so I hope he’s going to take to us too, as it made me like him at once.

Labels: allotment-crops, allotment-potatoes