italy 1.0 the potato cronicles part 2
what happens when city folk pretend to be organic gardeners.
You can read part one of the potato chronicles here.
Love from bella Italia! We arrived two days ago and are resting up in the beautiful Italian late winter weather. I can’t wait to share our adventures from this trip, including food shopping, cooking and, of course wine! The Italian Potato Chronicles are part of my free Substack. If you’re interested in my stories about Italy and our travels, you might like to become a paid subscriber. THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE!
Acqui Terme, May-August 2004
Don’t get me wrong. I like potatoes.
This doesn’t mean I need to have three rows of them, each 300 feet long. Having potatoes is like having pets. They need care and you can’t ignore them. Well, I could have, but Franco, our neighbour, wasn’t have any of it. Michael, being German, was completely enamoured with the thought of our own potatoes.
Our own personal, completely unplanned potato farm:
Never mind we were trying to get our property into shape to welcome our first 2 sets of paying guests on the first of September. By getting in shape, I mean jackhammering many tons of porous stone to put a pool next to the 400 year old house which had the bejezuz shaken out of it.
The pool diggers knocked on the door after taking the hole down another inch, shouting IS IT DEEP ENOUGH YET?
Of course, we were rarely in the house because we had more important work to do. Potato farming.
Before we got an actual handle on what a time suck potato farming can be, Michael noticed what looked like lumps of caviar on the underside of just about all of our many hundreds of potato plants. We took the leaves to Franco, our consigliere for all things Italian country, and he confirmed our worst fears. Potato beetle eggs. But not just any potato beetles. These were a variety called Colorado Potato Beetles that had been brought back to Italy by ship from the USA. They were known to devour potato leaf foliage with vengeance. Not only did we have massive infestation, but we had been delivered this horror by my own people.
We asked Franco what we could do and he was clear - we needed to spray pesticides. I gasped. There was no way we were pouring poison on our plants. Franco told us not to worry. The pesticides would only go on the leaves. The potatoes were under the ground and safe, he said, with a shocking amount of certainty.
I grilled him about alternatives.
Well, Franco said, with a look on his face that said this was going to be bad, “you can take the eggs off by hand….” his voice trailing off as he flipped his hands over, like what we’d have to do to every single leaf of three three-hundred foot rows of potato plants.
That, or the beetles would do what they do best, which is this:
While the back yard at the top of our hill was pummeled by a jackhammer attached to a bulldozer, we scraped a billion potato beetle eggs and larvae from hundreds of plants into a disgusting mush and lit them on fire. Because we had nothing better to do with our time 8 weeks away from opening an upscale bed and breakfast that was intended to provide our livelihood.
And please, let’s sigh collectively at the realisation as to why organic vegetables cost so fucking much.
It all would have been ok, but just two weeks later, beetles were in every stage of gestation: eggs, larvae, fully grown and reproducing. There were multiple potato beetle sex orgies taking place that spring on our field. We tried to keep up, but it was a losing game. You miss some. You go from killing eggs and larvae to smashing beetles and hope for the best. It was a staggering amount of murder for a product that I could pick up at the market for almost nothing.
Somehow, we managed to keep enough foliage on the plants to have a bumper crop of organic potatoes growing underground. At this point we had no idea how the potatoes underground would get brought up on top of the ground because I did not ask. I frankly didn’t want to think about digging up God-knows-how many potatoes from dirt while frantically putting together room decor and creating breakfast menus and preparing myself to be some kind of a hosting goddess.
We managed that spring and summer to get the rooms ready.
Before:
After (forgive the old tv technology and the darkness of the photography but it was 2004):
Eight weeks to paying guest arrival quickly became four. Four weeks out, the pool looked like this. Everyone looked happy, like it wasn’t going to take an act of God to get this thing finished.
And our beautiful grand entry looked like this:
List making and panic commenced. No skills we had obtained prior could prepare us for the next six weeks of our lives, but we lived to tell the story.
And it’s a story for another day.
Do you still rent to guests? I’d love to book on my next trip!
Love this post. When the going gets tough, the tough get going! And that you did it with fine flair. Kudos!