CHAPTER XV. MRS. BETH’S REQUEST
THE Reed family were at breakfast. Lucy had peeled some potatoes, and baked them brown in the oven, and they were very delicious, the children thought,—so much better than with the skins on.
“Gill dug the potatoes while I was sick,” said Sally. “I am sorry, for we lost our lesson.”
“Maybe papa will tell us about them,” said Ben:
“I think you must know nearly as much as I do about this common vegetable,” said Mr. Reed. “Did you not help to plant it?”
Sally recollected that she and her mother were with Gill when he put the tubers into the hills, and that he told her how each little “eye” in the potato was a germ of life, and would sprout, and send up a new plant to spread out its green leaves, and display its purple and white blossoms and its little clusters of green seed balls, as big as some of Ben’s marbles. She and Ben went down cellar when they had finished their meal, to see the different varieties. The “early rose” and the “mercer” and the “pink-eyes” and the “blue-noses” and the “ladies’ fingers.”
“These big fellows Gill cuts in pieces to plant,” said Ben. “And he takes care to have two eyes or buds in each piece, for fear one might fail. He planted some seeds from the ‘apples’ as he calls the potato-balls, and there were tubers as large as a hen’s egg this first year. He says they will bear nice potatoes, fit for food, the third year. He has put them away as very choice seed.”
Mr. Reed told the children about the wild potato, which belongs to South America. He said, “It is a great blessing that it was transplanted to various parts of the world, and that it bears so well its exile from its native land, and gives nourishment to so many people.”
He told the children also that the potato plant is of the same family as the woody nightshade, which has purple flowers and red berries, and the garden nightshade, which has white flowers and black berries, and the deadly nightshade or belladonna, with its reddish flowers and purple berries.
“It is only the tubers that are wholesome,” said Mr. Reed. “The leaves and blossoms are narcotic, and produce a similar effect to the poisonous belladonna and henbane and stramonium.”