Potatoes: food with a jacket. Bringing on the early growth with seaweed

"With a little kelp from my friends". Tending to the early potatoes with seaweed.

Today’s question for you: what is a Highland Burgundy, a Shetland Black and a Skerry Blue? Correct, they are all kinds of potatoes, grown here in Scotland and often to be found on your plate in The Torridon restaurant.

Potatoes have been a staple in the Scottish diet for centuries along with oatmeal, and preserved fish such as pickled herring known as roll mops and salted or smoked fish such as kippers or salmon.

An early way of growing the potato crop was in “lazy beds”. This was actually quite an intensive method of growing crops borne from the necessity of trying to create soil on rocky ground. It involved carrying sea weed up from the shore, setting in the potatoes on top and turning any available turf or soil on top.

In the Torridon Kitchen Garden, the gardener is far from lazy and has brought up many loads of seaweed from the shore and is currently “chitting”, bringing into early growth this season’s potato crop prior to planting out.

We are growing many varieties of potato in small useful quantities this year to offer the usual blend of quality, colour, taste in the food prepared by the chef. Even the humble potato has much to offer the culinary wizards.

Often the magic of vegetables is captured in the softness, the rugged nature or crispness of their names.

Heritage potato varieties that we are growing include; Dunbar Rover, Highland Burgundy Red, Mr Little’s Yetholm Gypsy, Salad Blue, Skerry Blue, Shetland Black, along with Pink Fir Apple, Desiree, Charlotte and Red Rooster and up to six varieties of blight busters.

Savour the names and come taste the flavours they offer.