What a fab summer!

First published in Nottingham Organic Gardeners Newsletter Autumn 2013

What a fab summer! In my third season at St Anns Allotments I’ve finally got to see what my allotment is really capable of. So good to get enough sun – and enough rain too. But it didn’t seem like that to start with, and what a strange year or so it has been. Back in spring 2012 we were in a drought which we were told would take over a year of exceptional rain to recover from. And that wasn’t going to happen, was it... but it did. We optimistically sowed seeds and booked holidays in Britain but the summer never really seemed to arrive. Potato blight came in waves, and mildew and slugs did for my courgettes. 

Autumn carried on in the same way, and people who will never get the difference between weather and climate started making snide comments about global warming.

2013 didn’t get off to a particularly good start either. Though I spent a bright New Year’s Day enjoying sun at the ‘lottie, before things really got going there was that extraordinary late snow. I don’t think there’s been snow on my late March birthday since the original one, and my Easter cycle trip to see friends in Devon was hit by blizzards. My April 2013 allotment photos still look like winter: in 2012 photos it’s definitely spring, the potatoes are in, the broad beans are up, the currants are in leaf. So all my lovely seed potatoes from Potato Day had to wait quite a while till I planted them. 

But then things started to change... by May plants were starting to catch up, and there’s not much between the allotment in late May 2012 and 2013. 

June wasn’t exactly flaming, but was starting to give us hope that this year, maybe, perhaps, we’d get ‘a summer’. Just as July was getting going, as the forecasters were getting more and more confident about a heatwave, as the allotment was starting to need watering, and as the weeds were starting to flex their muscles, I went off to The Netherlands for two weeks. Well, I’d promised myself a decent cycle tour this year, big birthday ‘n all that. My dedication to my allotment can only go so far. 

Fortunately I had a deputy, who went there every second day and kept it all alive. I also spent quite some time summer-proofing my cabbages and kale with a massive chicken-wire and mesh structure to keep pigeons and butterflies off, and mulching all the beans. 

Back in the UK with a cyclist’s suntan and a slight addiction to stroopwafels I was relieved to see that the allotment was green and thriving. But what was this? Last year I had noticed a few, just a few, tendrils of bindweed. It hadn’t bothered me, after all the allotment does have ground elder, couch grass and Japanese knotweed! But here now was a great carpet across the whole of my orchardy/forest gardeny area. When I pulled a bit, half the allotment moved. So I carried on winding it all up into a ball – quite fun but could have done without!

So what about the produce? My broad beans were prolific last year but I’d over-wintered them and they got horrendous chocolate spot. This year with spring sown ones in an (eventually) decent late spring, they were spot-free. I tried asparagus pea – but won’t bother again. I’ll sow the rest of mine as a pretty border plant but it’s a sparse crop for the space, and I couldn’t detect any asparagus flavour. Dwarf and climbing French beans were great – and I’ve finally learnt not to sow too many. I tried runner beans for the first time in years, and trained them up into the tree above the plot as they were too tall for my bamboo poles. They were fine, but I feel that you get a lot less leeway between too small and too big than with French beans. Better for the back yard where you can check every day. On a similar subject I had planted a ‘Di Nizza’ courgette which did really well. In August I checked it one Saturday, and there was a lovely little courgette, just too small to pick... then I went away that week (bit of a theme here!) and the next Saturday the courgette was bigger than my head...

 

I’ll save details on the potatoes for another time, when I’ve had a chance to try them all, but suffice it to say that it was my best year yet. I even had to dig up a path to get some out! Although the late spring meant my onions weren’t much to write about, I’m still cropping healthy beetroot and chard.   

So, how did the brassicas get on under their cage? Well, it worked, but maybe too well. It was actually more Karen-proof than cabbage-white-proof, and I ended up spending several hours picking caterpillars off, after laboriously pulling up tent-pegs and squeezing under the cage. I can see why people use fruit cages for their brassicas now! I did have help though: once the cage was lifted off I saw a common wasp carry away a small caterpillar, and that several caterpillars had stopped moving and were surrounded by yellow pupae of the parasitic wasps which had eaten them from the inside out.

 

Finally, it’s been a great year for strawberries, with a couple of kilos from my small-ish patch, enough for some jam! I’d tried to do things properly this year, putting straw round them and netting them. Was it this, or was it the weather? I’ll never know. Every time we say something like “this year I’ve grown...” we’re actually saying, “this year me, and nature, have grown...” This year it’s been a great partnership. I’ll forgive the fact that nature loves bindweed and cabbage whites as much as beetroot and strawberries.

What's in a name?

First published in Nottingham Organic Gardeners Newsletter Spring 2012.
A week or so after our Potato Day, I was putting my tubers into egg-boxes to chit. Colleen, Lady Christl, Red Duke of York, Charlotte, Desiree, Lady Balfour, Linda, Sarpo Mira, Anya, and Robinta. Wait a minute, isn’t there a hint of a theme there? Why are my potatoes nearly all named after women? Maybe it was me, unconsciously choosing potatoes named after members of my gender rather than picking them for their pest resistance, productivity or whatever. Linda sounds like a good potato, but I do also have two good friends called Linda!

So I looked back at the list from potato day and did some very basic statistics. It’s called counting. There were 13 which have women’s names, including the two Ladies named above, and British Queen. Bonnie Dundee and Belle de Fontenay are probably girls too. There were a few which were possible, such as Aura and Harmony, but both are descriptive words in their own right so I didn’t count them. Mira and Robinta sound as if they should be women’s names but I’m not sure, so I didn’t count them either. 

 Some of my 2012 potatoes, later in the year.

So how about male potato names? There were five. Duke of York (Red or not), King Edward, Picasso, Romano, and Ulster Prince. Even without the Bonnies, Belles and Miras, there’s no comparison. The difference is the ones simply given a female name, rather than named after a famous woman. There were more famous men than women – but that’s another issue! So what was going on? I decided to find out, and in the best tradition of contemporary journalism (if that’s not an oxymoron) I spent an evening googling. 

An investigation of the potato names on the British Potato Variety Database didn’t reveal much, just that potatoes like Orla, Cara and Colleen are Irish, no big surprise, and Nadine, Harmony and Anya are Scottish. So they weren’t all from one seed company, nor were they all of one age. Then, looking at European varieties, I discovered that it wasn’t just British breeders, but French and Dutch and many others tended to give their potatoes women’s names, Annabelle, Fianna and Mona Lisa being just a few. 

So was it something to do with the history of the potato in the west, and when it became accepted as a vegetable? It took many years from the potato being brought from South America to it being the staple of so many countries. It is a fascinating story which even includes Marie Antoinette wearing potato flowers in her hair. However for many years potatoes were regarded with great suspicion, and were called names like ‘Devil’s apple’, ‘Forbidden fruit of Eden’, and ‘Eve’s apple’. Women being implicated again, but it doesn’t seem to connect with current names. 

I came across a report that an international team recently tried to sort out the tangle of 600 scientific names for potato – which corresponded to just 4 cultivated species. There were also about 100 wild species, with about 500 scientific names. As you can imagine, this will help in communicating about potato breeding as scientists search for new genetic inputs for addressing issues of climate change and pests and diseases. But no clues about the cultivar names.

Then I discovered the article ‘Why the Quechua Women Grew Four Thousand Species of Potatoes’ – and was off on another fascinating side-track. The Quechua are a pre-Hispanic culture in the Andes, and the tradition of propagating potatoes by seed is continued by the women in gardens (while often the men farm commercial potato varieties in fields). The women’s potatoes have an incredible variety of shape and colour after thousands of years of selection, and have names which reflect their traditions, environment, and relationships: ‘like an old bone’, ‘like a deer’s white tongue,’ and ‘makes the daughter-in-law cry’. Wonderful stuff, but I couldn’t see that this, coincidental as it was, would have any influence on names many years later. And why did the daughter-in-law cry?

Then some more delights, via Google books: back in the old days in Peru in the Amará language they used a different system: red potatoes are usually considered female, whilst white ones are associated with maleness. So ‘Saq’ampaya’ means ‘Long Male Potato’.  No sniggering. But also the answer to my new question: in Quechuan ‘Cachan huacachi’ means, yes, ‘Potato which makes the daughter-in-law cry’ – because it has very deep eyes which makes it difficult to peel. Poor daughter-in-law, I’m sure she was doing her best, but the old harpy just kept giving her horrid potatoes. 

Fascinating stuff, but I still don’t really know why so many potatoes have women’s names. I guess the real answer is quite prosaic: potatoes are named after women because most are bred by men. And women’s names sound nice. Would we want to buy a Fred, Derek or Wayne potato? (sorry Fred, Derek and Wayne!)

References:

http://varieties.potato.org.uk/menu.php

www.wikigender.org/index.php/Why_the_Quechua_Women_Grew_Four_Thousand_Species_of_Potatoes

www.cambridge.org/us/books/kiple/potatoes/htm

‘The Complete book of Potatoes’, De Jong, Sieczka and De Jong. (Available via www.google.co.uk/books/ )