Taters and the deep freeze

Samwise Gamgee waxed lyrical about them in “Lord of the Rings” movie. Rincewind the Wizard yearned for them like other men yearn for women in “The Last Continent”. Humans loathed them in “Empire of the Vampire” because they’d become the only food available after the rise of the title empire.

Fiction is probably full of references to the spud, a New World import of even greater significance for the course of history than tobacco. In the Slav family, potatoes are a near daily staple. Also, last year we had such a good crop despite the early heat that this year we tripled the seed material.

This is part of last year’s crop. We only bought an early variety and even though we paced ourselves with the collection, it only lasted us for about six weeks. So this year, we bought one superearly variety, the same early one we grew last year, and a late variety for the autumn.

We placed all that spud wealth in crates and initiated the process known as chitting, even though the earliest variety, by the beautiful name of Agatha, does not need chitting, per experts. And good thing we did. Because we won’t be able to put these in the ground for at least another two weeks.

This is how the Agatha looks right now:

And this is the other early variety, Ranomi:

The late one, Picasso, is doing what late varieties do, taking it slowly:

And this is the week-ahead weather forecast. You don’t need to be fluent in Bulgarian to comprehend the horror fully. The numbers with a minus sign in front of them are the minimum temperatures we can expect at the end of this week.

Potatoes need a minimal temperature of 6 C to survive and higher than that to start growing, according to farming websites. Which means we’ll have to wait until at least February 28 to make sure the soil is warm enough at least during the day, in order to be able to start planting.

Now, according to gardening advice websites, the optimum period for chitting potatoes is 4-6 weeks, which is good news because we set the Ranomi at the end of January and the Agatha and the Picasso a week later. They still have a good chance, especially if we remove the black plastic from the Agatha we put there to slow down the process. But for that good chance to materialise, we need the winter to really move on by March 1. Fingers crossed.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to go cover the strawberries and the crazy fresia, which is out early again, risking its life in the frost, and plant the new raspberries we just bought in pots to await their permanent planting when the weather improves. Good thing we have lots of dry walnut leaves we never cleared up from around the trees. And pots.