A home in Ireland

Potatoes made their way to Europe in the early 1500's. The first country to embrace them there in a big way was Ireland. It was also from Ireland that potatoes made their way to North America, with immigrants who settled in 1719 just across the border in Londonderry New Hampshire, an hour's drive north of us.

Potatoes gradually gained acceptance across all of Europe, eventually edging aside peas as the main staple in most people's day-to-day meals. In the mid 1800's, a major failure of the potato crop in Ireland led to a the immigration of over 200,000 families from that island to the United States, a good number of which settled in and around Boston and New York.

How potatoes are grown

Most home gardeners do not grow potatoes from seeds, like you do with most other plants. Instead, new potato plants are grown from small chunks of an existing potato. You plant the potato chunk in the ground and — viola — 4-6 weeks later, up pops a new plant!

To do this right, however, you must make sure that each chunk you stick in the ground has at least 2 or 3 good potato eyes in it. Potato eyes are those little squiggly dents in potatoes that look like belly buttons — except that a potato has lots of these, not just one like us.

When you plant a chunk of potato, those eyes become the spots where new roots start to grow. Most people don't call these little starter chunks "chunks," however. They call them by the most distinguished name of "seed potatoes."