The excitement never stops here is the Japanese countryside.
A few months ago, we planted potatoes. This weekend we harvested them!
I still regard this whole experience as something of a miracle.
Of course, growing up in Detroit, Michigan — which at the time was the automobile capital of the known universe — I was very familiar with plants. There was the Dodge truck PLANT over on Mound Avenue. There was the auto assembly PLANT in Sterling Heights. My whole town was full of and surrounded by such plants. From age 14 through high school, I worked as a shipping clerk assistant for an automation machinery company which sold their product internationally. We shipped 150-200 foot-long machines which machined everything from cylinder heads to crankcases to intake manifolds, by sea and land to automotive manufacturing plants in Germany, England, Argentina, Australia and so on. Some of our behemoth product lines were even painted green, I guess to go with the wallpaper in the gigantic factories which would house them. True, I had heard of this thing called a “farm” but thought it had something to do with cultivating baseball players for the major leagues. Not really curious enough to give it much thought, I assumed that since people needed food, it just somehow showed up at the supermarket. The idea that edible plants had to be planted, then slowly and organically grow into something useful and hopefully delicious, was never on my radar.
Okay . . . enough about my pitiful agricultural ignorance.
It’s never too late to learn unless you’re dead. Since I’m still alive and minimally sentient, I have embraced the whole gardening thing with random relish and earthy delight.
But enough talk. Feast your hungry eyes on our potato harvest. While you do that, I’ll be surfing the internet for potato recipes. Because yes . . . we’ve got a lot of potatoes!
You’ve heard the expression, “The world is an oyster.” It’s attributed to Shakespeare, from The Merry Wives of Windsor. I have to come clean. I never bought into that. In fact, for some reason lately I’m leaning toward: “The world is a potato.” Which puts a whole new spin on global warming, wouldn’t you say?
