The Nightshades are deadly! Potatoes & Tomatoes

Nothing encapsulates the old and new in Irish gardens better than the nightshades: Potatoes and tomatoes. Potatoes have been ingrained in Irish history and politics for hundreds of years, whereas tomatoes are a relatively new edition to Irish gardens. If it weren’t for glasshouses on commercial farms and polytunnels in family gardens, we still would import all our tomatoes from Holland and Spain and be very, very limited when it comes to choice of varieties. Remember polytunnel growing in Ireland is only about 30 years old.

So, in comparison to the growers in southern Mexico, who cultivated tomatoes 500BC or the people of Italy, where the tomato arrived in 1522, we are really “green behind the ears” when it comes to tomatoes.

The story of the humble spud

The history of the potato, the world’s fourth largest food crop, is quite different. The Inca Indians in Peru were the first to cultivate potatoes around 8,000 BC to 5,000 B.C. Sir Walter Raleigh introduced potatoes to Ireland in 1589 and it then took nearly four decades for the potato to spread from Ireland to the rest of Europe. And we all know what happened to the ‘Lumper’ and how the blight and the Famine have shaped Irish history.

Roosters top the list of potato varieties that Irish people have heard of, according to a Bord Bia study in 2012 and floury Kerr’s Pinks are still on many people’s shopping lists. But much has changed in the last 10 years and with the arrival of the GIY (Grow It Yourself) movement around 5 years ago, more and more gardeners and growers are looking for blight-resistant varieties to avoid spraying with bluestone or even chemicals.

New very blight resistance varieties

And alternatives in the shape of the Sarpos (Sarvari+Potatoes) have arrived. Bred by a Hungarian family and supported by the Sarvari Research Trust in Wales, Sarpo Mira, Sarpo Axona and Bionica are starting to become household names and are available in our Eco shop. They are not only the most blight-resistant varieties they are productive, taste good and suppress weeds. 

The Heritage Irish Potato Collection by horticulturalists Dermot Carey and David Langford recently won an Irish Food Writers’ Guild award for the collection of over 200 varieties of traditional Irish potatoes including the ‘Lumper’ famine variety and the ‘Irish Apple’ which dates back to 1768.

Tomato trial at The Organic Centre 2013

If we accept that there are around 7500 varieties of tomatoes according to Wikipedia and that Gerhard Bohl, a German collector grows 3000 varieties then the 60 plus varieties we trialled at The Organic Centre last summer are actually ‘peanuts’, if you allow me that comparison. Nevertheless they produced a stunning crop in our polytunnels and the varieties Sweet Aperitif and Sungold won our taste trial and were also endorsed by Brid Torrades from Osta Café, Sligo and Piero Melis from The Courthouse restaurant in Kinlough. These varieties will soon be available as plants from our Eco-Shop

Which varieties to choose?

Sowing from seed though gives you a much wider choice and, based on our experience of growing tomatoes for about 15 years, we can recommend:  Gardener’s Delight, a variety that reliably produces good tasty tomatoes, Yellow Submarine the best tasting yellow tomato in our opinion and very prolific, Tigerella, a novelty with golden stripes and really fine flavour and Koralik, one of my personal favourites that can be planted in big pots or even hanging baskets.

When to sow and plant potatoes and tomatoes?

Potatoes can be planted in polytunnels from February onwards to be harvested by the end of May. In the outside garden many people in Ireland traditionally plant potatoes around St. Patricks Day, but if you have missed the date don’t panic, an old Irish saying that I learned from a neighbour in 1987 goes like this: “You can plant potatoes as long as you can look through an Ash tree!” Works for me!

For a good crop of tomatoes you need to start the seeds in March, pot them on in April and plant out in the polytunnel late April or early May when the chance of frost has gone.

Tomtato – the latest fashion

The latest news about the nightshade family is Tomtatos, a tomato grafted onto a potato. We at The Organic Centre think it’s not so new after all, as we grew them with our students 3-4 years ago. It’s an interesting experiment to graft a cherry tomato like Gardeners Delight onto an early potato like Orla and it does work, but the yield of both, especially the potato is not great. We would rather recommend the more traditional ways of growing Nightshades.