Potato

a well known plant of the nightshade family. It is a native of Chile and Peru. A wild variety is found as far northward as the mountains of Colorado. The potato was cultivated quite generally by the American Indians before the discovery of America. It was carried to Spain from Peru early in the sixteenth century. Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have brought specimens from Virginia in 1585. For a century or so the potato was cultivated in European gardens as a curiosity, and was regarded by scientists as of mere botanic interest. It became a field crop first in Ireland. In 1772 Frederick the Great introduced the culture in Prussia. One-eighth of the arable land of that country is now devoted to raising potatoes. Potatoes are so important a crop in Ireland that they are jocularly called "Irish apricots," or "Munster plums."

The potato is the most popular of all vegetables. The name was first and properly applied to the sweet potato or native batata. It is so used in the South to this day, the common potato being known by way of distinction as the Irish potato; but the error has been passed over, and it is too late to save the potato from going under a stolen name. Being native of the Andes, it has been called, poetically enough, "the apple of Peru."

The potato is related closely to the tomato, ground cherry, and egg-plant. It is allied to tobacco. The stalk, leaves, blossom, and fruit of the potato and of the tomato vine are quite alike. By fruit we mean, of course, the green "potato ball" that succeeds the blossom late in autumn. A cross section of a potato ball shows that it resembles a tomato very closely in shape and in the arrangement of the cells and seeds. The fruit of the potato plant is unfit for food. The edible portion is the swollen starchy end or tuber of an underground stem. The potatoes do not grow on roots, but terminate underground stems. Roots branch, but do not have buds. The eyes of a potato are buds. They all point upward or away from the center of the plant and are most numerous at the extreme end of the stem or tuber. When kept from frost over winter the eyes or buds sprout and produce new plants. The tomato-like seeds in the potato balls are sometimes planted by way of experiment. They are like apple seeds in that they do not come true or produce potatoes like those grown on the parent vine. In this way new varieties may be developed.

The potato contains seventy-eight per cent of water and eighteen per cent of starch. As an article of diet it is deficient in nitrogen and fat. It should be supplemented by such articles of food as oatmeal, butter, gravy, eggs, beans, and meat. Potatoes contain a trifling amount of an alkaloid poison akin to the nicotine of tobacco. It resides chiefly in the skin. It escapes during boiling and gives the characteristic odor of boiling potatoes.

As stock food potatoes belong to the same general class as corn and other starchy foods. A bushel of potatoes furnishes somewhat over one-fifth as much food as a bushel of corn. It is profitable, therefore, to sell potatoes at twenty-five cents and buy corn at one dollar per bushel. Professor Henry of the Wisconsin Station claims that four and a half pounds of boiled potatoes are equal to a pound of cornmeal in feeding value for hogs. To the animal, potatoes may be fed raw, but they should be sliced to prevent choking, and should be combined with food having a high per cent of nitrogen, as clover or alfalfa.

Gardeners have taken pains to improve the potato. The large, mealy tuber now placed on the table is different from the small, watery potato first made known to Europeans. The world's potato crop is dependent on weather and soil conditions. The United States has so great a diversity of soil and climate that a fair crop is to be expected somewhere between Maine and California. It has happened that the entire potato crop of a country like Ireland has rotted in the ground by reason of a wet autumn. The following statistics are to be regarded therefore with caution, as they do not represent the yield of any one year, nor are they complete. They were given out by the United States Department of Agriculture for the potato crop of 1907:

No statistics are available for Switzerland, Portugal, Argentina, Transvaal, Egypt, and some other potato-growing countries.

According to the same authority the American potato crop for 1908 was:

See Alcohol; Starch; Burbank; Tomato