ENHS Nature Trails November 2003 Article 3

Johnny Gunter Potato
by Tom Titus

It is a late October afternoon, so close to perfection that it almost hurts. The midday sun is ablaze, temperature a ridiculous 75 degrees, the air as dry and clear as high-grade champagne. Late October afternoons like this don't visit western Oregon every day, nor every week, nor even every year. Late October is the time when Pacific storms line up like a succession of cyclonic Cyclopses hissing wind and spitting rain onto a landscape parched by summer drought. Late October is the time of Falling Back, when our summer Daylight Savings account is drained by a winter Standard of dark, cold rides home. Late October is when the curtain closes for six months, when people finish putting in their wood and refill prescriptions for Prozac. Late October is the beginning of hunker time.

So this particular afternoon is nearly screaming for my attention. In a temporary fit of sanity I fold up the computer and walk out on work, counting my blessings every step of the way that what I do for a living allows me to get away with such heresy. There are other tasks to be done, toil that replenishes the soul rather than the bank account. Arriving home I change into real work clothes, throwing a shovel, spading fork, and a few buckets into my aging Toyota pickup. Together we head southwest out of Eugene, toward the Smith River garden.

The garden was born in the spring of 1999 in anticipation of the worldwide computer meltdown that would meet us at Y2K. Blessed with any common sense whatsoever, I would have taken down the garden in January 2000 when the computers kept computing, the lights kept lighting, and the technofrenzy we call life continued to careen wildly into a completely uncertain but fully automated future. From my house in Eugene the garden is 35 miles by the short-long-pretty country way and 45 miles by the long-fast-ugly freeway route. There are a lot of gardens in Lane County, but to my knowledge I own the county record for "distance traveled to place of food production." Heck, I'm not even in Lane County when I get there. Confessing this to my gardening acquaintances usually produces outward astonishment. Secretly they are a little embarrassed for me.

Today is made for the short-long-pretty route. The Willamette Valley is known for its greenery, but as I break free of the suburbs and follow the winding road through Fox Hollow, yellows dominate the color scheme. A golden sun shines on summer-browned grasses. Yellow bigleaf maple line the roadway, and the Oregon ash growing along the creek bottoms is nearly blond. There is a brief stop at the Lorane General Store for a giant white chocolate macadamia nut cookie, half cooked and gooey, exactly the way I like them.

Turning onto the logging access road that twists into the Coast Range, green regains preeminence in this earthy fall pallette. These hills have long since been converted from forests to tree farms and are covered with second and third growth Douglas fir. Occasionally I pass a stand old enough to have an understory of vine maple, my new favorite tree. It flowers in the beginning of spring and is an early nectar source for pollinating insects. The wood is extremely tough and springy and was sometimes used by Native Americans to make hunting bows. Burned slowly, it makes decent smoked salmon. But in October its beauty supersedes any utilitarian value, the yellow and orange leaves punctuating an otherwise dark and somnolent understory of conifers The driveway to the Smith River place is a discreet tunnel into the fall foliage, angling slightly uphill and littered with the first fallen leaves. It opens onto a four-acre meadow with an old house on the left and several outbuildings uphill to the right. It belonged to my Great Uncle Johnny Gunter, son of James Gunter who began the family legacy on Smith River when he settled on a piece of O/C Railroad land in the 1890's. Mom and Dad have Johnny's place now, and it's the last property on the Smith River that remains in the family. The others belong to timber companies.

The garden sits on a rise above the house. Most of it has been put to bed for the winter, and a groundcover of oats and fava beans is emerging from the chocolate brown earth. The small plants are my army of green garden elves. In their public life above ground they protect the dirt from the winter onslaught of rain and weeds. But they carry on a more important covert existence beneath the soil. Their finely branching roots add nitrogen and compost that foster a dynamic, subterranean ecosystem of earthworms, fungi, and bacteria. This week the oats have also contributed to the above ground fauna. Last trip over I must have left the gate open, and the deer (a doe and her yearling judging by their tracks) wasted no time in capitalizing on the untapped resource of tender green shoots. No matter, they have all winter to grow back.

Not all is oats and fava beans. On a small part of the bed farthest from the gate lie a group of large, dark green potato plants, some still bearing a few lavender-colored flowers. The Yukon Golds, All Blues, and Cranberry Reds have long since grown, flowered, died back, and been harvested. But we are now solidly into fall, and the luxurious potato foliage, overflowing onto the garden paths, has been growing continuously since early last spring. This is aberrant potato behavior. Despite this continuing exuberant growth, a hard freeze is scheduled for later in the week, and the time has come to find out what lies below these gargantuan plants.

The anticipation of digging potatoes is like preparing to open a birthday present that has been sitting in mystery on the front table for five months. Peeling off my shirt and settling in with the spading fork, I begin turning the earth from well outside each plant to avoid damaging the crop. The potatoes churned to the surface are not Idaho bakers, bred and sorted for uniformity. Rather, they show up in all shapes and sizes, classically round to gnarly and grotesque, peanut-sized nodules to one-pound behemoths. Some show clear evidence of quality control by the local gophers. The skins are light beige with a subdued pink mottling, the color of raspberry swirl cheesecake. The tiny, pink eyes squint under the mellowing afternoon sun like a two-day hangover. And unlike the barren, monotonous, plastic-wrapped, goddess-forsaken Russets that fill our supermarket bins, these potatoes have a story. Marion Gunter lived just over the rise to the west of younger brother Johnny. Both made regular trips from Smith River to the northern California logging town of Happy Camp to visit younger brother Don and wife Edith. Don likely gave the potato to Marion, who, not being a gardener, passed it along to Johnny, who grew it and knew a good food plant when he saw one. Fortunately he was also a good neighbor and gave some seed tubers to Mrs. Leslie two miles up the road. Also fortunately, she decided to spread the goodwill and passed tubers along to the Gatchells.

It happens that Mom and Dad were visiting the Tronsons, who recently had lost their house to fire and were moving back to Drain. Life in town, even a small town, is a little more forgiving to older folks with health issues. Jerry and Lois Gatchell were there to pick up a variety of things that the Tronsons had no use for in their new digs. The conversation turned to heirloom fruits and vegetables and out came the story of the raspberry cheesecake potato. Lois, a little embarrassed that Mom hadn't heard about it, had always assumed that Mom was up to date on such important aspects of the family legacy. When Jerry's mom Martha died later in the summer, Mom went to the memorial service and Lois and Jerry brought her some tubers for starts. Mom and I have a soft spot for family history of any kind, especially when it pertains to food, and we started growing the potato at the Johnny Gunter place last spring.

If this all seems a little complicated, that's because it is, and that's somewhat the point. Those of us blessed with a start of these potatoes understand that it would not be propagated by a quick early spring trip for more tubers at the local feed and seed store. The only way to keep this potato going over the long haul is to grow it, year after year, protecting enough from the gophers to ensure a supply of seed tubers for next spring. So a complex network of human relationships means that more people are growing it, and therefore the likelihood is lessened that a rare endemic potato variety will go extinct. If one of us loses all of our potatoes due to some unforeseen catastrophe, we can always run down the road and get some seed from the neighbors.

We're not certain how Don got the potato, but he had an inclination for tinkering and horticulture and may have developed it himself. The Gatchells sent a few to Ronniger's Potato Farm, a seed potato company in Idaho, who pronounced it unique and marketed it for a time as the Johnny Gunther [sic] Potato. Recently I sent photos of the tubers to Alvin Mosely, a faculty member in the Oregon State University Department of Crop and Soil Sciences and author of the "Potato Information Exchange" website. He'd never seen anything like it and suspects that Don may have developed the variety from seeds. Most potato propagation is done clonally from tubers which are genetically identical to the plant from which they came. However, some varieties produce seeds in small, tomato-like fruits that can be harvested and "grown out." Modern potatoes carry four copies of every gene, and these multiple copies are stirred in unpredictable ways during the genetic reshuffling that occurs when seeds are produced. This recombination can result in a wild array of potato offspring, any one of which can be propagated clonally from tubers.

Don or someone he knew got lucky and hit on a variety of features that were attractive. The plants grow all summer so the roots are producing tubers all season long. This means that by late October there are potatoes in all stages of development, from thick-skinned, hardened-off spuds ready for storage, to thin-skinned new potatoes, usually available only in late spring or early summer, and then at the expense of the storage potatoes. Another benefit, the Johnny Gunter Potato may be somewhat resistant to pests such as wireworm and scab and may be less attractive to gophers than our tried and true Yukon Golds. (This year I lost half my Yukon plants to a single gopher that ate them from the roots up, leaving me with anchorless, pathetically wilted corpses sprawling on the surface.) Prolific too are the Johnny Gunners, we grew 60 pounds on about 30 square feet of garden bed, an impressive yield in my limited potato growing experience.

Despite the obvious benefits to small-scale agriculture, the Johnny Gunter Potato will find no place on industrial farms. Agribusiness champions the ecologically and genetically monotonous crops manipulated for mass production, herbicide resistance, and marketable appearance. This methodology is marketed to consumers as necessary to "feed a hungry world," but increasingly, it seems that mass food production is necessary to feed the profit margins of an increasingly smaller number of corporate food producers. There are many signs that this approach has been myopic. Industrial agriculture requires huge amounts of fresh water, and the water that remains is poisoned by runoff containing fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Worldwide topsoil loss is 78 billion tons (156,000,000,000,000 pounds) per year. Prairies in the United States Heartland have lost one half of their topsoil after 100 years of farming. The foundation of corporate agriculture floats on a sea of petroleum needed for pesticide production, powering of large farm machinery, transport, and plastic packaging. Modern agriculture also inhales vast quantities of natural gas that is the feedstock for chemical fertilizers. These hydrocarbon resources will soon begin their irreversible decline, taking with them the very basis on which modern food production rests.

More insidious is the erosion of biodiversity wrought by agribusiness. The natural world thrives on diverse gene pools and multifaceted ecosystems, but industrial agriculture has produced entirely the opposite result. Prior to the industrial revolution, crop diversity was maintained by subsistence farmers growing locally adapted varieties, or land races, that were preserved by seed saving. These local races were prized for their ability to produce a crop year after year under local conditions. Since the 19th century 90% of our commercially available crop varieties have been lost. In 1984, 5,000 open-pollinated plant varieties were available, but by 1994 only one-third of those remained. Moreover, this erosion of the gene pool has been accompanied by ever-increasing concentration of seed resources. At the turn of the millennium, four companies controlled 69% of the North American seed corn market and 47% of the soybean seed market, and at the end of 1998, Monsanto controlled a whopping 87% of the U.S. cotton-seed market.

The gnarly, pink-eyed, overgrowing Johnny Gunter Potato stands outside all of this madness. On a syrupy, shirtlessly warm October afternoon, it's tempting to think that the small portion of genetic and human diversity sequestered in this simple spud might somehow save the world. In reality, the world needs every potato variety it can get. The Johnny Gunter Potato is just a microcosmic indicator of the future of farming. The new agricultural system must emphasize sustainability through soil growth, edible home landscapes, and maintenance of genetic diversity through seed saving. Such a system places a premium on human interaction through local food communities. The visionaries for this brave new agricultural world are the permaculturalists and biodynamic farmers, represented locally by organizations such as the Food Not Lawns collective and the Eugene Permaculture Guild.

Although the Smith River neighbors don't have a membership roster or an electronic discussion group or a website or a mission statement, the Johnny Gunter Potato owes its continued existence to their homegrown, hand-me-down approach to horticulture. In an idiosyncratic combination of sociological and biological elements, they were acting as a small, very localized food community, looking after each other, themselves, and their culture by spreading a good thing around. The potato certainly has agricultural merit, but would no doubt have been abandoned to the trash heap of aborted horticultural experiments, had it not been a worthwhile endeavor in home food production. The neighbors also kept the potato for the aesthetic value embodied in its uniqueness and in memory of Johnny, a lifelong inhabitant of their valley. The diversity personified in the Johnny Gunter Potato owes its continuing existence to both humanity and practicality.

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