Sharing With Potato “Bugs”

One image I didn’t include in my most recent “Welcome Home” post was a photo I snapped of a clan of mysterious potato “bugs” munching away on my fingerling potato plants. (I haven’t been able to discover what these “bugs” are, so I use the b-word loosely.) I didn’t omit this image because it was negative in any way; I wanted to save it to talk about sharing.

First off, I’m going to sit in amazement for a moment about how efficiently these little, brown, globby guys raised and fed their young on the potato leaves. Some leaves had six or seven of the young critters lined up in a perfectly parallel configuration, munching away. As they grew bigger, the “bugs” would take off on their own, searching for their own leaf to devour. (I think of it as the potato munchers’ manifest destiny.) Whether individually or in a group, they made fine, fast work of their meals, leaving few (if any) leaves on the potato plants.

I talked to the Deva of my garden and asked for information and direction here. Although I strive for my garden to be an inclusive — rather than an exclusive — one, I recognized that I wanted my family to have a turn eating from these potato plants, too! I think I expected the Deva to tell me to keep sharing, in the spirit of ultimate inclusivity, but instead I got the direction that it was time to tell the “bugs” to move along. Ahhhh, more boundaries. They’d simply had their share; now it was my family’s turn.

So, one afternoon during the heat wave (whoo, was I hot!), I put on the lightest pair of garden gloves I could find and gently removed those “bugs,” one at a time, from the potato leaves. One plant had been completely devoured and lay limp, brown, and rotting on the soil. The others, though, still had enough leaves and life to keep going. By that time, the bug clan had mostly moved on, leaving me only a handful to relocate. I think that even they knew their turn in the potato patch was over.

Yesterday, I went out to look at the remaining potato plants again, and the life force that I’d seen on “bug moving day” was obviously dwindling. So, after checking with Nature, I dug up the fingerling potatoes growing in the soil and moved the wilting greens to the compost pile. I can sum up the experience best with one word: “Wow.” I unearthed more than 20 potatoes — beautiful and begging to become dinner. By agreeing to share with the “bugs,” I assumed I’d have a weak and pitiful potato harvest, but I was completely wrong. There were even potatoes hanging out under the plant that the “bugs” had chewed to pieces before I moved them along.

Now, those potatoes are gone, devoured this time by my family. I tossed them in a bowl with olive oil, sea salt and rosemary and roasted them till done. The skins burst open with a flavor that I’ve never before tasted in a potato, and I realized that this is what fresh potatoes taste like. The culinary experience was life-changing. And I think that the flavor was sweeter and the texture more sumptuous because I’d chosen to include rather than exclude, share rather than battle over the potatoes. I sincerely hope that the leaves had a more powerful, balanced, and fulfilling flavor to those mysterious, potato-eating “bugs,” too.