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Tag: Lumpers (Page 1 of 2)

Spud Sunday: Notes From A Spud Island

PEI, it’s potato country here – it’s a big part of who we are as an island, a big part of who we are as a culture

Kendra Mills, Marketing Director, PEI Potato Board

The first thing, the very first thing that Grant, my endlessly amiable guide did when I landed on Prince Edward Island – before lunch, before a cup of tea, even – was to whisk me off to the offices of the PEI Potato Board. He explained later that, while he had escorted many visitors around the island, each with their own agenda, I was the first he had encountered with quite such a singular focus on spuds. And I wondered – as a dedicated potatophile might – why that would be, for here on PEI – potato capital of Canada, Idaho of the north – there is an awful lot for the spud-minded to see.

PEI Potato Board

First stop, the PEI Potato Board

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Spud Sunday: From Famine To Feast

It was a mighty busy week last week and no mistake. Amongst the various goings on, yours truly featured in last Friday’s installment of Dublin City FM‘s Sodshow with Peter Donegan, to which you can listen back below (and, yes, the interview was recorded much earlier this year – at Sonairte‘s Potato Day – hence the springtime talk of potatoes chitting in my hallway).

Curiously enough, it was when I reemerged from the recording of said interview that I stumbled into what I later christened The Great Potato Standoff of 2013 – an incident which had everything to do with the feverish interest generated by the return of the Lumper potato last March. And, as I learned this week, those newly-resurrected Famine-era spuds are far from a flash in the pan…

Boiled Lumper potatoes

A feed of Lumpers

Back in March of this year, Marks & Spencer Ireland announced a limited three week run of Lumpers, grown for them by Michael McKillop of Glens of Antrim Potatoes. It signalled the first time that the Lumper potato – which had been the mainstay of the Irish peasant farmer in the pre-Famine era, and which had succumbed in such devastating fashion to the onslaught of blight in 1845 – had been grown in any kind of significant quantity in Ireland in around 170 years.

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Spud Sunday: Like It Or Lumper

Sonairte Potato Day

Sonairte Potato Day:
first held in 2011 and lovely to see it make a return this year
under the stewardship of Trevor Sargent, with the
Lissadell/Langford collection on display, lazy bed demonstrations, good potato eating in the café, and talks on potato growing and
on the fascinating world of the spud

I will think of it hereafter as The Great Potato Standoff of 2013.

The white-haired gentleman had, in my absence, clutched one of my two packets of Lumpers and was peering somewhat demandingly in my direction.

“Well, are they for sale or aren’t they?” he said. It was more challenge than question. He repeated it several times.

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