Potatoes

It is potato harvesting season here in the San Luis Valley––many, many huge trucks on the highways loaded so full that you can find "roadkill" potatoes at the corners where the trucks turn.  So, some excerpts from OREGON CLIPPINGS about potatoes will be the subject of today's blog.
 
*Sam Owen has made a discovery that will be of vast importance to Eastern Oregon farmers in all dry seasons.  He has found by planting onions and potatoes in the same field in alternate rows the onions become so strong that they bring tears to the eyes of potatoes in such vast volumes that the roots of the vines are kept moist and a big crop raised in spite of the drouth.  Sam tells us that Jack Allphin is trying an experiment, too, but says he don’t think it’s any good.  He has crossed the early eggplant with the milkweed hoping to harvest custard pies.

*Mlle. Emma Calve is probably the only great prima donna who combines farming with her brilliant operatic achievements.  She has a large farm at Cevennes and rusticates there each summer.
     Last summer the famous singer went into her kitchen garden and cared for her own vegetables.  No one was allowed to touch them and the results were far better than when her gardener cared for the things.  Mlle. Calve wore a short skirt of blue jeans, sabots, and a linen shirt waist.  She spaded and hoed and watered her vegetables day after day and proudly sent gifts of the finest fruits of her labors to friends in Paris.
     The prima donna was very ill and nervous when she went to Cevennes, but this free, open-air life and the vigorous exercise soon restored her to the most robust health.  When friends ask her the secret of her cure she answers: “Spades and potatoes.”
     Mlle Calve’s chickens also come in for some of her attention but the garden is her chief delight.

*A good many gardeners have made money out of early potatoes, says the Asotin Sentinel.  The very first sold at $3.60 a bushel.  The present price is $2 for 100 pounds when sold directly to the consumers and $1.75 when sold to dealers.

*A prominent scientist of a mathematical turn, having a little spare time on his hands, devoted some of it recently to computing the bulk of food he has consumed in the seventy years of his life.  The resulting figures are surprising and in the comparative details of his report the average man who eats and drinks will find much to interest him.  The scientist says, in summing up, that if all the bread he has eaten could be duplicated and gathered together, it would weigh fourteen tons.  He has feasted on a good-sized herd of oxen, sheep and pigs, which, if represented in one animal of each of the kinds mentioned, would make the prehistoric mammoths like like babies.  “If all the milk, tea, coffee, beer, wine, liquor and water I have used or wasted in those years,” he continues, “had been stored in a vessel of sufficient capacity, its size would make the famous Heidelberg tun look like 30 cents.”
He reckons that he daily ate one and one-half pounds of bread, biscuits, cakes and crackers during sixty out of his seventy years of life, adding that as a boy under 10 years he probably consumed about half that quantity.  This makes in seventy years 280,000 to 300,000 pounds of bread, etc., a quantity equal to 441 cubic yards.  “A man eats on the average three potatoes a day, weighing in the neighborhood of one-quarter of a pound,” continues this authority.  “That isn’t much per week and per year, perhaps, but it amounts up in sixty or seventy years.  Imagine twenty-one potatoes piled up week after week for seventy years, making due allowance for a lesser consumption during the first ten years.  The giant potato evolved would fill two flat railway cars of the longest kind, and 100 men would be unable to move it.

There is more to this article and some pictures in the book.  I'm still working on the book but no specific publication date yet.