Seed potatoes

      A long wiki link on potatoes can be found at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato

            I myself like eating, including potatoes. That I can grow them locally appeals to me.

            Where I live today in east Tennessee on the Cumberland Plateau growing, preserving, and eating  potatoes is a lost skill. So I have to figure it out on my own. Now maybe enough local people still know how to do this, but I don't know any of them. Thank goodness growing potatoes is forgiving,  or so I think.

            One surprise to me was the idea of seed potatoes. Apparently the bags of potatoes usually offered in the USA grocery stores are often sprayed with something that tamps down the reproduction process that helps feed us if we plant potatoes. For example, one "seed potato" can grow pounds of food for humans. A sprayed potato grows less, or so I hear. And we can cut up seed potatoes, too;  like into sections that have tubers growing on the outside. And we can do the same with store potatoes, though don't expect as much output.

            Basically, a seed potato is just a potato that has not been sprayed. So it has more tubers, or whatever you call the things that grown out of potatoes.

            So if times should get hard, and one likes eating potatoes,  consider keeping this post in mind.

            Last, and for those historians who remember the Irish potato famine that sent so many immigrants to the USA, keep in mind the famine applied to one single type of highly productive  potato grown there at the time. Most of the Irish people put all their eggs in one basket, as the old time saying  goes, and suffered a lot, like starving and being cold and hungry.  At least we in the USA are more diversified as to our favorite potatoes.