Greaves's Guide to Gourmet Ground-apples

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ChrisGreaves
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Greaves's Guide to Gourmet Ground-apples

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OK, bit of a stretch from pommes-de-terre, I'll Give you that.

My trips back from the supermarket(s) are governed by the volume of my orange shoulder-bag.
Which means, for spuds, the five-pound sacks. Just as well. It takes me long enough to get through five pounds without them spouting.

This year, Foodland has begun offering spuds in four different colours, and instead of just grabbing a bag from the area with no-one blocking the rack, I felt that I was old enough to think about the differences between them.
So for the other Seniors out there who have spent their lives stuffing food into their mouths while studying a program text, here you go.
Education!

There are four types of bags at Foodland, so four photos; so one and one-third posts.
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Russet potatoes are good for baking (think glowing coals)
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Yellow potatoes are good for mashing (think “butter”)
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Red skinned potatoes are good for baking (think red skin from a baking sun)

(next post)
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ChrisGreaves
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Re: Greaves's Guide to Gourmet Ground-apples

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2021_20211211_103318.jpg
White potatoes are for boiling. Think “white clouds of steam)

Cheers and :munch:
Chris
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HansV
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Re: Greaves's Guide to Gourmet Ground-apples

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ChrisGreaves wrote:
16 Dec 2021, 20:07
It takes me long enough to get through five pounds without them spouting.
I'd be worried if my potatoes started spouting...
Best wishes,
Hans

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ChrisGreaves
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Re: Greaves's Guide to Gourmet Ground-apples

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HansV wrote:
16 Dec 2021, 20:40
I'd be worried if my potatoes started spouting...
Hi Hans. I think I know what you mean. I worry about them growing green skins.
A bit of sprouting doesn't worry me; I just rub off the sprouts.

Last spring I chopped three sprouting potatoes into quarters and dropped them into holes in the waste-ground behind the shed, so that when folks pestered me with "Have you put in your potatoes yet?" I could dismiss them with "yes". Potatoes being cheap to buy at the supermarkets.
Darned things were my best crop! I hate it when that happens.

Elliston is, as you all know, the root cellar capital of the world, so to avoid having to move to Elliston I have built myself two root cellars as a trial:-

(1) In the spring time rake and sweep up all the salted road-side gravel that the city plough dumps at the foot of your driveway. (I think the technical term is “moraine”
(2) Take one or more 25-litre plastic pails, drill three holes in the base with an auger-bit or attack the base with a hammer and chisel-bladed screwdriver.
(3) Load the gravel into the pails and stand them under the eavestrough-less eaves; give them eight months to rinse out.
(4) Prepare a couple of square feet of floor space in the laundry which sits at a steady 5ºC throughout the winter.
(5) In the fall, put a one-inch layer of gravel in a pail, then lay down a layer of potatoes or artichokes and top up with just enough gravel to cover the tubers.
(6) Each month add one layer of tubers and cover with gravel.
(7) When the pail is full, wait one month then ...
(8) ... each month remove on layer of tubers, cook and enjoy.
If this works I shall expand next winter to more artichokes and more pails.

Cheers
Chris
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Re: Greaves's Guide to Gourmet Ground-apples

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ChrisGreaves wrote:
16 Dec 2021, 21:19
... I have built myself two root cellars as a trial:-
Two months have passed; also a year (does that make it fourteen months?) and this time last month I foraged in my root cellars. And again tonight.

2022_20220212_175222_HDR.jpg
Tonight is vegetable night, so I grabbed two store-bought potatoes from one root cellar, a handful of artichokes (various varieties that came up, or rather grew down, last year) from another root cellar, and three carrots from another root cellar. They got a light scrubbing to remove the grit (most of it), and are ready to be diced for the pot. (Just to the left is a suggestion that tomorrow is "National Grapefruit Marmalade Day")
2022_20220212_180115.jpg
This is one of the two 25-litres pails - the artichoke pail. The potato pail looks just like it. Underneath the surface are oodles of root vegetables.
2022_20220212_180121.jpg
I had run out of 25-litre pails so I stored carrots horizontally in a hanging plant pot and the darned things started sprouting! I have lost some nutritional value from this, but next year ...

I am particularly pleased that the artichokes are looking good, because I want to plant some next spring, and thus harvest more tasty Jerusalem Artichokes. Potatoes and carrots grow in plastic bags down at Foodland and at Swyers, But JAs can't be bought for love or money on The Peninsula. (Unless, of course, you know me, and then love alone will do it)

This time next month I shall extract a few more veg from my root cellars, so you will all be doing me a great favour if you bookmark this page and make entries in your calendars (Skitterbug: NOT colanders) and that will save me having to take a set of identical photos, resize them, upload them etc.
Ta ever so
Chris
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Re: Greaves's Guide to Gourmet Ground-apples

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ChrisGreaves wrote:
16 Dec 2021, 21:19
...so to avoid having to move to Elliston I have built myself two root cellars as a trial:-
We are forecast to have above-zero temperatures for the next six days, so this afternoon I got the stirrings of an urge to contemplate the possibility that one day soon I might be out in the garden and turned up the heat in the laundry from 5c to 20c (which meant that it reached 12c), and started going through my root-cellar tubs.
2022_20220406_152859_HDR.jpg
I have been raiding the artichoke bucket about once every three weeks for a quart of tubers to boil with my meat&veg supper, one time to fry (as we used to in South Australia), and so was surprised to see how many I have left. The plastic tub measures about 24"x15" and is about two tubers (twobers?) deep. Each tuber must be washed/scrubbed to rid it of grains of sand, but the taste is worth the effort.
And today or tomorrow I will be the only cook in Bonavista using artichoke tubers as filling in my meat pies!
I found too a small pail in which I had stored in dry soil some "Stampede" and "Nahodka" for this year's planting.
Tuesday, May 04, 2021 was the date last year when I planted the tubers. I might bring that date forward by a week.
2022_20220406_152906.jpg
In this close-up, the purple-circled 'choke is the size of my fist. That's a serious chunk of starch etc. The yellow circles indicate tubers that have sprouted ever so slightly; these guys are eager to get going!
Perhaps that indicates that I can plant once the daytime temperatures reach a steady 5c?

The carrot pail was a hanging basket, and three carrots remain. All the carrots turned out to have fine roots; perhaps their sand was too moist; perhaps the roots were not deep enough to shield them from light.

Now to check out the third root cellar - my potatoes.
Cheers
Chris
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Re: Greaves's Guide to Gourmet Ground-apples

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ChrisGreaves wrote:
06 Apr 2022, 18:20
Now to check out the third root cellar - my potatoes.
Well, that didn't take long.
20220406_155314_HDR.jpg
This is a close-up shot inside a 5-gallon pail. With my fingers I scraped away the upper layer and found that my potatoes (secretly grown behind the shed last year) have sprouted!
I will not eat these brave little warriors.
I have a plan to build potato-towers this year on the little plot where the 2nd driveway used to be.
We can ignore 80% of the potato-tower videos on YouTube; adding soil to the top of the tower as if the potato shoots were celery has to be pointless because
(1) If the shoots are continually smothered they will not be able to operate at peak food-producing capacity and
(2) AFAIK potatoes do not grow in profusion on the stems; a few, yes, but not as many as underground below the stem.

My towers will be circular, about three feet high, with tuber-sprouts arranged around the sides, the shoots poking sideways to the perimeter until they hit the light.

Then next fall I will BRAG about the previous year's behind-the-shed potatoes that have delivered such a density of spuds-per-square-foot.
Heh heh!
Cheers, Chris
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