Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

I don’t suppose that a plate of freshly-dug, peanut-sized fingerling potatoes, steamed, drizzled with melted butter and topped with a couple of fried eggs, would ever have made it as nouvelle cuisine even though the essential elements are all there.
The direction of cooking in the 1970's and 80's was towards lightly-cooked vegetables, light sauces, and an insistence on fresh, high-quality, ingredients. So, with regular-sized fingerling potatoes retailing at $3.99 a pound and the very small ones being essentially unavailable - unless you grow them yourself, my quick supper certainly had the components of taste, exclusivity, freshness and expense.
In actuality, my tiny tasty morsels were the ones which, along with soil and bits of debris, had fallen through the bottom of the trays while the ‘French Fingerling’ and ‘Banana’ potatoes were being sorted and weighed!
At Peel Teaching Garden, all the potatoes have now been dug and the majority of them have been donated to the volunteer-run Knights Table restaurant, on Kennedy Road South, where they became servings in meals-for-a-dollar.
As well as planting the commercial grocery-store types of potatoes for donation, a few kilos of less common varieties were brought in from Alberta to grow as a test project. (See column #205 in below ). These coloured-flesh tubers and the fingerling types turned out to be quite the little goldmine.
I recently signed-up for a course at the Culinary Arts School of Ontario, in Mississauga. It’s a bit late but, having survived my own cooking for most of my adult life, I figure I might as well go out well fed. When I went to pay the course fee, I took a basket of the fancy potatoes to see if there would be any objection to letting the other students taking the course try them out.
After slicing a couple of the tubers and tasting them raw, chef Chris Hockley asked "Do you want to sell them?" So much for giving the potatoes away! After the Teaching Garden students and volunteers had taken what they wanted, the remaining specials went for incorporation into the menu at The Elliott House, the college’s associated fine-dining restaurant.
What a nice balance. The majority of the potato crop went to feed people who are at or past the limits of their resources and the smaller amount of high-end produce created income to pay for all the seed.
The whole vegetable patch was something of an experiment this year. Apart from a thick layer of straw which had lain on the area over winter to smother the weeds, the land was just as it was left when it was last farmed - maybe a decade ago.
There were no fertilizers, pesticides or regular irrigation used.
One of the things to be discovered this year was the relationship between the weight of seed potatoes planted and the weight of crop produced. There’s lots of information available about potato yields in tonnes per hectare but how many tonnes does it take to plant a hectare? That piece of information has to be available somewhere, but be darned if I can find it. What a home gardener really needs to know is how many kilos of crop can be expected from a kilo of potato seed-pieces?
Even without growing a thing, one intuitively knows that the answer to the question is going to be: "Depends"! Depends on the particular variety of potato; depends on the fertility and texture of the soil; depends on the amount and timing of rainfall; depends on the temperature conditions; depends on the amount of damage done to the plants by pests and disease; depends on how big each seed-piece is.
With all the variables, there can’t possibly be any absolute answer that is good in every place or every year. The best that can be said is that, in this year and in this place, this variety produced this much.
Last May students and volunteers planted 2 kg. each of nine different potato varieties: All Red, Banana, Chieftain, French Fingerling, Kennebec, Superior (4 kg), Russet Burbank, Russian Blue, and Yukon Gold. Now that all the crop is dug, we have a baseline. The crop to seed weight ratios varied from 5.5:1 for Kennebec to 13.25:1 for French Fingerling. The 20 kilos of seed-pieces planted produced a total crop of 175 kilos so overall the yield came to a little under 9:1.
Next year we’ll do it all again. With the students attending classes over this coming winter plus volunteers returning from previous years, there should be enough labour available to double the area planted to vegetables. Given what has been learned this year, perhaps the amount of fresh produce available for donation will more than double.