Much excitement planning for the year ahead at the London Potato Fair
Sunday morning I set off to East Dulwich (or at least I think it was East Dulwich, my mental map of the city doesn’t cover large parts of south east London) to visit the annual Potato Fair and Seedy Sunday held on the 4th Sunday in January.
It was my first visit to the event. I’ve missed previous years with a long list of excuses. But this was it, I was in the car making my way through bits of Peckham I didn’t know existed, thanking my lucky stars that a mobile phone can now can server as satellite navigation device. Peckham Rye was quite beautiful in the misty Sunday morning light.
I got there a little after 10am, I can’t say I was expecting the crowds that met me as I arrived, it was like first day of the January sales. The inside of the academy’s sports hall was ringed by school tables along which ran a continuous line of black plastic flower pots each piled high with a different type of potato, starting by the door with first earlies working it’s way via 2nd earlies round the entire hall to late maincrops.
Around each pot crowds jostled, putting a few tubers into the brown paper bags provided and awkwardly scribbling down the names on the lumpy potato-filled bags bag whatever writing implement came to hand, then they joined the queue to pay. This meandered its way round the entire hall like a boa constrictor in a cardboard box.
I love events like this: love the fact so many people make their way from all over London (and further afield) to buy seed potatoes. I love the idea that there are Potato enthusiasts, I even fancy being one.
Why I was there I wasn’t quite sure. Potato blight has cast its shadow over our efforts for the past 3 years, coupled with the fact we don’t seem to be drawn toward blight resistant strains, but more recklessly towards seemingly esoteric ‘heritage‘ forms (I’m not sure I like the word heritage, but can’t think of a better one for now). Our only hope has been to get the potatoes in early and grow early cropping varieties, eating them small in an attempt to beat the blight.
I bought small quantities of Highland Burgundy, Mr Little’s Yetholm Gypsy, Aura, Salad Blue, Shetland Black, and Blue Vitelotte. Sadly there were no Bluebell tubers, a white and blue potato that we particularly enjoyed last year. The man running the stall said, he’d supplied them for the past few years, with high hopes of them catching on, but demand had failed to meet expectation and he’d stopped supplying them (for now). He told me people were growing ‘kestrel’ instead as it was stronger. I had a look at kestrel but they didn’t look like the same thing at all, and failed to capture my imagination.
In the centre of the hall was a small cluster of tables that housed the ‘Seedy Sunday’ part of the event. I have to say there wasn’t the variety of seed I was hoping to find there. Nevertheless, I enjoyed rummaging through a variety of homemade seed packaging, from hand written brown paper envelopes to home made packets carefully and thoughtfully fashioned from glossy magazine pages, each pack giving semiotic clues to the heritage of the seed inside.
I bought some pea, bean and pumpkin seeds to give away as presents.
I bumped into a friend, Ros, who has an allotment in Dulwich and then we went back to her house to talk potatoes.
Anyone else bought their potatoes yet, and what are your favourite varieties?
