Gun Spuds

Pinkeye potatoes, writes PAULETTE WHITNEY, just aren’t the real deal unless they’re grown in South Arm.

It’s time to plant potatoes and I’m committing sacrilege. There’s no problem with the rows of dainty, French pink fir apples, knobbly kipflers or stalwart King Edwards. Those are all free from the shackles of Tasmanian tradition. My sacrilege is this: I am, against all that I know to be right and proper, seeding a row of pinkeye.

Any true Tasmanian – that is, my mum – will tell you that the only proper pinkeye potato comes from where she grew up: South Arm. A little peninsula near the mouth of the River Derwent where the soil is black and sandy, and the proximity of the sea protects the land from frosts, meaning the earliest of early potatoes are at their peak from October until just before Christmas.

In the garden of Mum’s childhood, my chook-farming grandad grew pinkeye, the sandiness of the soil meaning he could pull the whole plant with barely the need for a fork, shake off the loose earth and fill a box with little potatoes – the proper size for a pinkeye being around that of a ping-pong ball, certainly never as large as a tennis ball. The tiny chats he plucked from the roots of each plant were a delicacy.