#potato famine

[goodhairbadmanners]

[bloodstainedthesnow]

look i love soft-spoken fee as much as anyone else but have you considered...

Fiona Frauenfeld who is opinionated and brash, always has been, but was always quiet about it, because a village where nobody likes you is hell on earth to live in. So she says nothing, when in company, only whispers under her breath, scathing when walking over the village green and watching a gaggle of boys release a badger to chase some of the younger girls. Only growls lowly when the butcher raises his prices because she refused his son.

It doesn't save her in the end. She keeps her voice level and polite, as honest as she can, even as times grow hard, looks grow suspicious and minds weary. They still grab her from her home, smash her dishes and try to drown her.

After that, she doesn't speak at all.

Fiona Frauenfeld, who meets Hugh Apiston, a boy with bees in his stomach, loud and kind and just as accepting of her silence as he is of her views and ill temper. Fiona Frauenfeld, who is opiniated and just when she meets someone who'd let her be loud about it, loses her voice in the worst way.

[sheltiechicago]

[thoughtfulfoxllama]

Guys, Gals, NB Pals!

I don't know if you know about the relationship between the Choctaw & the Irish, but I found out about it today, and need to talk about it

Ok, so, I'm of strong Celtic Heritage (according to my Ancestry DNA, I'm 66% Celtic)

My Bio Family was always proud of our Celtic Heritage. I was always interested in my family history, but my family didn't know much

So, I did my own research, and found a bunch of cool stuff. My (specifically Irish) ancestors came from Munster, Leinster, the Isle of Man, and Northern Ireland

But today, I learned about how the Choctaw, after enduring the Trail of Tears, donated $320 (the equivalent of roughly $10k today) to help during the Potato Famine. And my ancestors were the recipients of their aid (my Irish Ancestors left in the 1870s/1880s, so a whole generation after the Famine). It touches my heart that the Choctaw, who had just been forced from their homeland by colonizers, who lost most everything, gave everything they could to support another colonized people

And Ireland helped in turn. Over $3mil in donations were given to the Hopi & Navajo during Covid. This wasn't the government stepping in (although I believe the Government did provide some aid), it was the everyday person. It was a people who remembered that when they needed it, a group that had just lost everything still gave what they could

I was raised to be proud of my Celtic Ancestors. I didn't know anyone specific when I was younger, but I knew they were a group who fought back against colonizers. And I hope to continue that trend. It's not the British taking Ireland anymore, and I am relatively safe from being colonized, unlike my ancestors. But that doesn't mean I don't speak up. I speak up for the Ukrainians who are facing Russia. I speak up for the Palestinians suffering under Israeli Attacks. I speak up for the US Territories, who's voices deserve to be heard in the Government

The Celts were fighters to their core. However, they fought for defense of their way of life, not just to claim more and more for themselves. And I will be damned if I let this die. I would be ashamed of myself if I did not fight for them as don't have voices, and if when I have kids I don't teach them to do the same

Pictured Below: "Kindred Spirits" in County Cork

A Monument to the Choctaw for their Charity

[superbeans89]

[tkingfisher]

I have a question I just thought of. I remember reading that the potato is something that you can discuss at length. I'm curious about the Irish potato famine (as it's called by many people) of 1845 - 52. The potato blight killed a whole load of potatoes, and blight warnings are still a thing today. But... honestly, why? Was just one variety of potato grown? If not, wouldn't different varieties have resisted? The only thing I'm even remotely familiar with is Panama Disease, which is killing off Cavendish bananas because they're all genetically identical - was that the case for the potatoes being grown at the time?

Oh boy. Okay, this is a huge complicated topic and I can only do the Cliff Notes version and even that is absurdly long, but here we go.

The cause of the Irish Potato Famine were, in order:

A) the British

B) the British but moreso

C) still the British but also capitalism

and

D) monoculture

I am not nearly so equipped to talk about A-C as many, many other people, so let’s talk about D.

Now, the humble potato is frankly one of the most glorious products of agricultural science ever created, for which we must thank the indigenous people of Peru, who produced some goddamn geniuses at potato breeding (and also figured out how to freeze-dry potatoes centuries before Idahoan.) The Incas had literally thousands of potato varieties, every size, shape, color, growing condition, right down to sacred potatoes only for consumption by the royal family. They did seriously epic shit with a weird little tuber, a feat perhaps only surpassed by the geniuses who made corn out of teosinte.

Quite a long time later—by which I mean about ten thousand years after the potato was domesticated—the Irish were growing a potato variety called the Lumper. It was a big, coarse, ugly-ass potato which apparently didn’t even taste that great. Irish farmers had other potatoes that they liked a lot better! But the Lumper had three things going for it—it gave huge yields, tolerated nutrient-poor soil, and it didn’t mind wet feet.

(Wet feet is the gardening term for plants with their roots in waterlogged soil. Most potatoes do not actually like wet feet and will rot. But the Lumper was fine with it, which meant that basically you could grow the things in poor soggy soil, which large swaths of Ireland had in generous supply.)

Because of a whole lot of really abusive shit by various landowners, a lot of Irish people ended up dependent on the Lumper for their diet, and I mean dependent. You can live for a really long time on cow’s milk and potatoes if you have to, and a potato that would produce massive yields in crappy wet soil was a godsend. So you had vast areas that were planted with just the Lumper. (There are some reports that other, better-tasting potato varieties were grown for the landlords, but while the workers dug them, they were not allowed to eat them. I can’t speak to the truth of this or not, but it’s definitely worth looking up a full history of the socioeconomics of the famine, if you ever happen to be feeling too good about the world and want to be crushed.)

Unfortunately, the Lumper has one other significant trait—it is extremely vulnerable to potato blight, a disease caused by Phytophtora infestans, which is a weird little thing called an oomycete. It’s more like a fungus than it is anything else, but it’s actually in a separate kingdom called Chromista. (Currently, anyway. Taxonomy is where idealistic young scientists go to become old before their time.) Nevertheless, for our purposes, let’s just call it a fungus. (Also, Chromista is a great name for an alicorn in My Little Pony.)

P. infestans loooooves members of the Solanum clan, which include tomatoes and potatoes. This love is not returned. In a tomato, it’s usually called late blight, in a potato, it’s potato blight, no matter what you call it, it’s bad news. It likes damp, cool conditions, and of course Ireland is basically one big damp cool condition, so once the blight got established, it was in heaven.

Blight on a potato takes about five days from start to finish. This sucker is FAST. One day there’s a blotch on a leaf, next day there’s some whitish stuff under a leaf, then the tubers are suddenly turning black and mushy and stink to high heaven. You may even think you got a good tuber and put it in storage and then you open the door to the root cellar and the whole bin has rotted practically overnight.

The spores can spread by wind, and once it landed on a potato plant, all it needed was like two days above fifty degrees with high humidity, and it was off and running. And it gets in the soil. But worst of all, it lives in the tubers themselves.

Potato cultivars, for those who don’t know, are almost always a clone of the parent. All Yukon Golds are basically the same Yukon Gold. You pop a tuber off a plant, you pop it in the ground, it grows another plant just like the first one, asexual reproduction at its finest.*

Now, potatoes can and do set seed, but there’s some variation even in a seed with two parents of the same variety. Two Yukon Golds might give you Yukon Goldish. Mix up multiple varieties and you don’t always know what you’re gonna get.** (I have grown potatoes from mixed seed and thus made my own cultivars, it’s fun, but the results are wildly variable. Some don’t set tubers at all, some contain high levels of solanine.***)

If you want specific, uniform varieties that all perform the same way, you probably use the tubers. More importantly, tubers start growing right away once you wake them up, whereas potato seedlings can be finicky and often won’t do anything impressive the first year.

To make matters more confusing, the little tuber clones are referred to as seed potatoes.

Anyway, back to the blight. Everybody was growing from little tuber clones, which could be infected with the blight. This means that if your seed potatoes are infected with blight, even if they look fine, if you plant them, your whole crop is infected. The minute you get a cool wet day, the oomcyte wakes up and goes to town. And if you leave an infected potato in the ground, it infects everybody else—and if you’ve ever dug potatoes, you know that you always, always miss one.

Well. The blight came, it hit the Lumper, and it spread like wildfire. The Lumper grew in the wet conditions the blight loved, and was also really susceptible to it, so it was a match made in hell. There were potato varieties even then that were more resistant to the blight, but they were tiny islands and a sea of blight was washing over them daily, so they eventually succumbed. Even if you planted a different potato, if it was in soil that had previously held the Lumper, it was likely doomed.

This is the problem with monocultures. You plant all one variety and it’s susceptible to some particular bug, when that bug hits, you have no fall back position. And potatoes, being more or less clones, are even more vulnerable than most seed-grown crops, and this bug is particularly nasty and the spring of ‘45 was exactly the right weather and the British government was being particularly evil and ultimately a million people starved to death because of a perfect storm.

The Lumper still exists. Somebody turned up some heirloom seeds back in 2008 and grew them out, and what they got is probably pretty close to the original. Being seed grown, it doesn’t carry the blight. It’s an ugly, watery, kinda waxy potato that even its champions think tastes sorta okay, I guess. Cultivariable, one of the few sources I can find, says that in addition to not being resistant to blight, it’s not resistant to anything else either, and there’s not much point in trying to grow it unless you have long dry summers and no local blight.

And that is the saga of the Lumper, the blight, and why I personally always plant at least four varieties of potato.

* There’s some subtleties here, but for layman’s purposes, we’ll go with this.

** It’s actually way complicated, but this is already hella long.

*** Same stuff that makes green potatoes toxic. Super bitter, so you know right away it’s inedible and spit it out. We still refer to taste-tasting the new crop from seed as “the Potato Suicide Pact” but it’s not actually dangerous.

[tiktoks-for-my-besties]

[m1cahx3]

Hey, nerd. Nice outfit!

Ireland 1845 called, saying something about potatoes.