Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series Book 5)

by Steve Solomon

The healthful potato is really the thing for getting through hard times. (If you don’t believe that the potato is a health-producing food, please skip forward to Chapter 9 and read what else I have to say about the common spud.) The healthful spud The “Irish” potato actually is a native (South) American crop from what is now Peru and Bolivia. However, to arrive in North America it first had to be carried to Spain in the 1500s. For two centuries the Europeans considered it only an amusing oddity until, in about 1700, a plant grown in a botanical garden in Sicily began forming tubers early enough in the season to be useful in temperate latitudes. Then the potato’s amazing productivity caused a massive increase of population throughout northern Europe. These people became the migrants who so rapidly filled North American farms and factories. Before the English brought potatoes to North America, the native North Americans practiced an agricultural system based on corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers, crops that had probably moved into North America from Mexico about 1,000 years before the arrival of the English. This gardening system required nearly an acre to support an extended family. The English-speaking Americans adopted the Native American crops; combined them with food crops brought from England, which included the potato from South America; brought the sweet potato (probably from the Caribbean); and created a hybrid agricultural system combining the benefits of three co...