Charlotte and Kestrel

There are many many varieties of potatoes and they all have names. Some are long established old strains but many are newly developed to resist the diseases that potato flesh is heir to.

I love when it's time to lift [dig up] the first few to see how well they have done.
Rather thoughtlessly I planted two 'second earlies' rather than any main crop but I always find that, if stored carefully, they keep well enough maybe through to the new year. 
The yellow ones at the back are Charlotte, a good salad potato with a waxy flesh that keeps its shape when cooked. In front with the purple blotches are Kestrel. I chose this at random but now I find the variety scores  highly on all counts: they have 'smooth skin with bonny blue eyes... ideal for baking, chipping and boiling ' and an excellent flavour.


There are many poems about potatoes especially by Irish poets. But I like this one that reaches back towards the original provenance of our favourite tuber. It's by American poet Joseph Stroud.*

The Potato

Three days into the journey
I lost the Inca Trail
and scrambled around the Andes
in a growing panic
when on a hillside below snowline
I met a farmer who pointed the way—
Machu Picchu allá, he said.
He knew where I wanted to go.
From my pack I pulled out an orange.
It seemed to catch fire
in that high blue Andean sky.
I gave it to him.
He had been digging in a garden,
turning up clumps of earth,
some odd, misshapen nuggets,
some potatoes.
He handed me one,
a potato the size of the orange
looking as if it had been in the ground
a hundred years,
a potato I carried with me
until at last I stood gazing down
on the Urubamba valley,
peaks rising out of the jungle into clouds,
and there among the mists
was the Temple of the Sun
and the Lost City of the Incas.
Looking back now, all these years later,
what I remember most,
what matters to me most,
was that farmer, alone on his hillside,
who gave me a potato,
a potato with its peasant face,
its lumps and lunar craters,
a potato that fit perfectly in my hand,
a potato that consoled me as I walked,
told me not to fear,
held me close to the earth,
the potato I put in a pot that night,
the potato I boiled above Machu Picchu,
the patient, gnarled potato
I ate.

* https://www.poetryflash.org/features/?p=MARCH-Riding_the_Dragon