Week 9: How the 1812 Garden Celebrates the IYP

While 2008 is also the inaugural year of the 1812 Garden, is it also the International Year of the Potato. The mission of this year long appreciation is to “Celebration of the International Year of the Potato (IYP) will raise awareness of the importance of the potato - and of agriculture in general - in addressing issues of global concern, including hunger, poverty and threats to the environment” (IYP). In the 1812 Garden we are celebrating the potato as well, by cultivating an extremely rare pre-Irish-potato-famine potato, the Cups variety. We worked hard to get our green thumbs on some of these rare seeds. Our Cups seed are from Donald Gilliland (of the Seed Saver Exchange), who acquired them from William Woys Weaver (author of Heirloom Vegetable Gardening), who in turn obtained them the Beamish Museum in Durham, England.
 

Ironically, the very time the first Cups potatoes were first being grown in America, a great debate about potatoes was raging in Europe. While the potato had undeniable advantages over grain as a staple crop, it was more or less a struggle to advance the potatoes popularity from Ireland to northern Europe. Both Frederick the Great of Germany and Catherine the Great of Russia had to force peasants to plant potatoes. In France, Louis XVI hatched a brilliant scheme to get peasants to plant potatoes by planting a field of potatoes on the royal grounds. He appointed his most elite guardsmen to protect the crop, but sent the guardsmen home at night. Eventually local peasants, convinced of the potato’s value, stole the tubers at night and potatoes spread across France. The last stronghold of anti-potato elitism was in England, where well into the 19^th century it was still considered nothing more than a threat to civilization.

That sentiment clearly has not lasted and today “the potato is already an integral part of the global food system. It is the world's number one non-grain food commodity, with production reaching a record 320 million tonnes in 2007. Potato consumption is expanding strongly in developing countries, which now account for more than half of the global harvest and where the potato’s ease of cultivation and high energy content have made it a valuable cash crop for millions of farmers” (IYP).

With potato production in so many developing countries growing, it is easy to understand the increased demand for different varieties. (It is hard imagining a variety that grows well in Russia flourishing in Sri Lanka.) This is why it is so important to keep a diverse assortment of potato varieties on the market. Who knows where the potato might need to be cultivated next, but if a diverse bank of varieties is accessible, then a potato with the proper characteristics to flourish in that climate can be breed. So in a sense, the potato’s potential is inextricably linked to its diversity. 

More often than not keeping the potato’s gene pool diverse means continuing to plant long forgotten varieties on an ever increasing scale, or ‘growing them out.’ The 1812 Garden will save all the potatoes produced this year for seed, and our Cups crop will expand next year.

 

International Year of the Potato mission (n.d.) Retrieved August 7th, 2008, from the International Year of the Potato website:http://www.potato2008.org/en/aboutiyp/concept.html