Recent studies in Canada and the U.K. have found that organic food is not more nutritious than traditional food.

I’m not so sure. Maybe there’s no difference in nutrition, but I’m positive that organic food is better tasting than the heavily fertilized variety. I know from experience that there is a huge difference in taste and quality.

Many backyard gardeners gave up growing potatoes years ago because potatoes are so inexpensive in the stores.

Canadian farmers planted an estimated 378,000 acres of potatoes this year. That’s 2,300 acres less than last year. U.S. farmers planted slightly over a million acres –almost the same as last year.

But China is now the world’s largest potato producing country, and nearly a third of the world’s potatoes are harvested in China and India.

There are about 5,000 potato varieties worldwide. The geographic shift of potato production has been away from wealthier countries toward lower income areas of the world.

Will Chinese-grown potatoes end up in Canadian stores sometime? That’s a scary thought. Did you ever think we’d have Chinese honey in our supermarkets?

Recently, I saw 10-pound bags of potatoes advertised for $1.77.You can’t grow them for that. And if you have potato bugs to pick, growing your own spuds can be a lot of work. But it’s worth the effort because your garden spuds will win in taste and longevity.

Yes longevity. Your home-grown ones will last (in storage) a lot longer. Potatoes have to be handled with care. They bruise easily.

It’s been at least 30 years since we last grew our own potatoes. It didn’t make sense growing potatoes, especially when summers were so busy.

But in recent years I was dissatisfied with store-bought potatoes. Sure, they were inexpensive but sometimes the potatoes were awful.

Potato growers fertilize their crop quite heavily.

That might be profitable for the grower, but what about taste and quality of the potato?

Home-grown garden potatoes are the best.

This past summer I did an experiment. I grew 100 potato plants on organic soil and grew them without any fertilizer.

What a crop!

They are mostly big ones weighing over a pound apiece. Many are one and a half pounds. A few weigh one and three-quarter pounds. The big surprise is that I haven’t seen a hollow or bad one. I gave spuds away to family and friends to see how they liked them. They loved the taste.

You are probably wondering about the organic soil. Back in the late 1970s we had a bulldozer clear some bush land stumps and fence rows. There was an old orchard nearby that had grown wild over the years and I had the bulldozer take it out.

Some of the topsoil, rotted wood and stumps were all bulldozed into a pile. Over the years I turned the pile over with the loader and always marveled at the soil texture. It’s a grainy loose clay soil full of organic matter.

Some of that soil was added to our little garden where we grow beans, lettuce, radish, beets, carrots, cucumbers and two dozen tomato plants.

The soil for my experimental potato patch was dumped on the edge of a hayfield (near the soil pile) in a row that is six feet wide and about 18-inches deep. I leveled it with the tractor loader, dug little holes, threw in a bit of old crumbly manure and planted the cut-up seed potatoes.

The plants grew like I had never seen before. The wet summer was ideal for gardens. There was no space between the rows; it was all stems and leaves. I couldn’t hill the plants because of all the foliage.

By early August I wondered if I’d have potatoes. Did the growth all go into the green stuff? I pulled up a plant and to my delight dug up a dozen beautiful large white potatoes along with numerous small ones. The ground was still soft and loose. We had them for supper that evening. My wife said they were the best tasting potatoes she ever had.

The potatoes grew among small chunks of rotted wood that hadn’t fully decomposed. I harvested the crop in mid-September. I’d say 70 per cent of the potatoes are large ones weighing over a pound each. There are no blue or bad parts to cut away.

I won’t be buying table potatoes this winter or next spring —just a half bag of seed potatoes.