Potatoes: A Family Legacy

I come from a long line of urban homesteaders. They wouldn’t have called themselves that—urban homesteaders, but in today’s vernacular that’s what we would call them. They didn’t homestead for the same reasons we do today, either. It never crossed my great great grandfather Abram “Kopel” Levin’s mind that he should reduce his family’s carbon footprint or be worried about the safety of the food that went into his children’s mouths. He planted a field of potatoes because he had to feed his family. And his 10 children, my great grandmother Sophie included, tended to the potatoes so they could eat. Potatoes were sustenance. They were life.

My great grandmother, Sophie Levin Scherper

In January 2009, I planted my first backyard crop of potatoes. I searched the web for information with the same voracity that I research my family tree. Could I really grow potatoes in south Florida? Yes, but they needed to be planted in late December/early January, our cool season, for the best yields. Some more web searching led me to a supplier of organic seed potatoes in Maine who was wonderfully helpful on the phone and answered all my novice potato planting questions. I found a website that demonstrated through pictures exactly how to plant the potato seed by creating furrows and ridges in the soil, how far apart to space the seed and the rows, how to add organic potato fertilizer before covering the seed in the furrow with soil, how to keep adding soil weekly once potato foliage emerged, and, above all, how to keep them moist—not so wet as to cause rot, but moist. Steady moisture leads to better yields. I wonder if my great great grandfather knew this, or did he just plant potatoes the way his father, Leizer, taught him to. If Kopel did know about steady moisture leading to better yields, it had to be from experience—his experience, his father’s experience, and the experience of generations of Levins I can only hope to discover.

My great great grandfather, Abram "Kopel" Levin

With research in hand and my seed potatoes ordered, it was time to build and prepare the beds for planting. I made a post on FreeCycle requesting cinder blocks. My dad and I picked them up, loading and unloading the back of the pickup truck 6 times to get them to their intended backyard destination. Back-breaking work when you’re 5-foot tall and weigh 92 pounds, yet somehow so easy when compared to the way Leizer and Kopel would have had to do it in the 1800s. But we did it and we got two 3 x 16-foot beds built 2 layers high. Then we bought the soil, 120 bags of it if I remember correctly, got them home, unloaded, and the beds filled. I amended the soil with an organic all-purpose fertilizer I had purchased from the seed potato supplier and then waited for the seed potatoes to arrive.

And they arrived. Four types—a baking potato, a red creamer, a Yukon Gold, and a purple just to be adventurous. I dutifully cut each potato so that each seed had at least 1 eye, furrowed my rows, spaced the seeds at the appropriate distance, sprinkled the rows with organic potato fertilizer to provide the extra potassium and nitrogen potatoes require, covered them gingerly with soil, and watered so that they were moist but not wet. And I watered daily. I wonder how my ancestors watered their potatoes. I imagine in the little shtetl of Ostroshitskiy Gorodok, Belarus, a small town less than 20 miles away from Minsk, my Levin family would not have wasted water. They would have used dish and bathwater to irrigate their crops. Simple homesteading common sense. I wonder if it was my great grandmother Sophie’s responsibility to carry dishwater out to the field as a young girl.

Sophie Levin Scherper

Foliage emerged as my internet research promised. A proud smile filled my face. I imagined Sophie smiling at me, nodding her head in approval. I faithfully attended my potatoes, watering them regularly and adding soil to the furrows from the neighboring ridges as their leafy greenness flourished. Flowers developed and I waited for the vegetation to brown and wilt. And then I harvested. I harvested too early. I should have cut the wilting stalks off so they wouldn’t go to seed and let the potatoes continue to grow, or harvested just some of the new potatoes and let others continue their journey. But it didn’t matter to me. Not for this first crop of potatoes. While I had harvested a good 30 or so pounds of delicious potatoes—not bad for a first crop on my less than 1/5th acre urban homestead—what I had really harvested was the roots of a legacy bestowed upon me by my great grandmother, and her father and grandfather before her. I had grown potatoes with Sophie, Kopel, and Leizer.