The Accidental Tuberist

Bringing food back to the ‘burbs, one spud at a time

The local small town shopping centre; A great place to pick up milk, gasbag about Mrs Jones’ promiscuous cat and find potatoes growing wild on the medium strip.

While collecting cardboard from the recycle bin the other day for a sheet mulching exercise, I found this little guild – of a spud with a purslane ground cover – occurring right outside the local convenience store. Right next to this companioning I also found a heap of lawn clippings, so I did what any permy would do when faced with such an opportunity. I mulched it.

Making use of old fashioned techniques I used the disregarded resource (mulch) and hilled our little friend in the hope of potentially obtaining a crop. This is what us permies like to refer as a “happy accident”. (I can personally relate to the potato as my parents sometimes referred to me as a “happy accident”.)

While being the potato paparazzi afterwards, I was spotted being snap happy by the manager of the convenience store who enquired as to why I was doing this act of clickity click. So always up for the chance to chat about gardening stuff, I explained the situation and my intentions of follow up. Of course he laughed cause I am pretty funny in my explanation of such things (tickets please!!). We were both quite curious as to how the spud got there in the first place.

My guess is that while dumping food out the back door one day the spud has rolled away to liberation and has through some kind of divination found its place to procreate.

I then kindly requested that he be a passive caretaker as I would like to follow the evolution of the aforementioned spud. He agreed wholeheartedly to such a duty and we were both happy.

Having been involved of late in establishing community gardens on the gold coast, the paper work and process to get these gardens going has proved quite challenging. Here we have free hold land, a caretaker, no meetings, no long-winded documents and it hasn’t cost a cent!! Lovely.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Some people spend six years and thousands of dollars at university studying resource management. This way is a lot quicker, cheaper and no doubt less stressful. Stay tuned for updates.