Potato Pete recipes for the 21st Century

This summer, we will be focusing on the main garden. The aim is to have the structure in place by the end of the year, so I can spending next year gardening rather than building the garden. It’s not that it hasn’t been an interesting experience, and I’m loving watching the design unfold and become the garden we want, but I’ve spent far more of the year wanting to garden than I will spend actually gardening!

How does a kitchen gardener choose what to grow? It’s about balancing quite a complex set of variables, which include the space and time available, the local climate and soil, the gardener’s skill level and what they like to eat. That last one is, itself, quite a complicated topic as culture plays a significant role. There are many thousands of edible plants on the planet; most people only eat a small number and grow fewer still.

It looks as though spring might be on its way in the northern hemisphere, and gardeners’ thoughts are turning towards tomatoes and potatoes. You may have already sown your first tomato seeds; your seed potatoes may be chitting on the windowsill. But what if you could get both potatoes and tomatoes from the same plant – a TomTato?

A quick and easy potato salad that makes a lovely side dish for a BBQ.

I invented this soup for lunch. I should say now that the only reason I weighed everything was so that I could write the recipe down for you – left to my own devices I just bung things in.

Have you noticed that potatoes left in the fridge, or in the bottom of a sack, tend to grow long white sprouts after a while? Discarded tubers can do the same in the compost heap, and it’s the way that seed potatoes start to grow when they’re planted out in the garden. Those long, white shoots are fragile and easily broken, and they can carry on growing to gargantuan proportions.

A seed potato is a potato that has been grown to be replanted to produce a potato crop. It’s the usual way that potatoes are made available to farmers and growers – although it is possible to produce potato seeds (also known as True Potato Seed, TPS), it is unusual to do so.

A simple supper recipe for chorizo and potato burgers, which can easily be adapted to make use of leftover ingredients.

It’s time to shake the mud of 2016 off our boots, and to prepare the soil for 2017 (metaphorically speaking). I have the bones of a planting plan for next year, which will be subject to revisions, and we know which areas of the garden still need work.

A little while ago, I told you about a preliminary experiment that Dr Wieger Wamelink and his team at the University of Wageningen conducted. It demonstrated that it is possible to grow plants in simulated Mars and Moon soils. 

I haven’t been doing a lot of cooking since my Inner Womble made beer bread a few weeks ago, and in fact the remaining breadcrumbs are still in the freezer. But now I am freelance and I have a bit more time and energy to experiment, and am keen to Womble my way through the stack of ingredients that’s lurking around in the kitchen.

I am making transcripts for The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a fascinating series starring Ruth Mott and Peter Dodson, with a voiceover by Peter Thoday. This is episode four (of eight). [You’ll find the other transcripts, and other relevant posts, under the Home Front tag.]