The Potato Competiton

As a young mother, I used to compete at the state fair in baked goods and jams.

I once showed up with a box of creations, several loaves and jars, balancing a baby on one hip and shepherding a toddler. The woman checking me in looked at all of it in wonder.

“How do you have time?”

I was honestly bored. I adored my children, but making bread, yeast breads in particular, just gave me a lot of joy. I won a blue ribbon every year in sourdough, and often in several other categories as well. Raisin bread was a particular specialty. I also won for jams in many categories, plum and elaborate berry blends. It was just something I did for a few years when my children were small.

My husband’s mother was an extreme gardener who lived in a little retirement enclave in southern England, with a crowd of other extreme gardeners competing endlessly with one another.

To say the stakes were fierce is to underplay the passion they felt for the exquisite daffodils or the roses of another. I once attended the garden club display in a local church hall where specimen after specimen was arrayed to perfection, one dahlia after the next, exquisite roses one after the other. How would one even judge them?

Gina had a green thumb, of course. I remember particularly her passion flower vine running in splendiferous extravagance down her fence. She is the one who told me the secret to getting orchids to bloom is to never cut the old stalks off.

But she was particularly known in her world for winning the potato competition. Each gardener was given a black fabric bag and a single seed potato. The person to grow the greatest poundage in the allotted time was the winner.

I also learned to grow potatoes this way. Truly new potatoes you just plucked out of the ground are one of the great pleasures of the gardening life, neon red and tender.

It so happened that one of Gina’s neighbors could not seem to grow these potatoes for the life of him. So he asked Gina if she’d grow his, and she did. On the sly, of course.

My father loved toy railroads, a thing to build in the quiet of one’s mind. He also played chess until the day he died, with an abiding love for the logistics of the game.

I gave up baking for the fair when I sold my first book. I didn’t have time for children and writing and baking yeast breads from scratch. But I did take up gardening on a pretty serious level, and I find myself right now feeling competitive in my new neighborhood.

In Colorado, my front garden was beautiful enough that once a landscaper stopped his truck as I was deadheading to ask who’d done the work. When I told him it was me, he was quite impressed.

In my new world, my neighbor is the star. Her coastal garden is as luscious as Gina’s, blossoms and leaves creating such glory that even my husband, who notices nothing, commented on it.

The point is not gardening or baking, it’s the little hobbies we imbue with our passion. Toy trains or medieval manuscripts or the perfect biscuits.

I sometimes worry what is being lost through our modern attachment to screens. A bored young mother is more likely to turn to influencers or social media than to pour her attention into mastering yeast bread. A retired old man is going to watch YouTube rather than build trains.

Am I wrong? I just don’t see kids picking up nerdy hobbies in the same way we did as children. Are there still model plane builders and amateur jam makers? I don’t know.

Most of you, I think, have hobbies, quilting and watercolor, gardens and art and reading, of course. I love my bujo, which is as much a hobby as a calendar.

Maybe we gather hobbies over decades, and maybe I’m bemoaning something that’s still alive and well. Maybe kids are learning to knit and do puzzles and grow flowers or veggies. I know my grandchildren love board games. Well, at least two of them really do love them.

But I wonder what’s lost if we stop doing things with our hands, if we stop fiddling with fountain pens or pieces of fabric or paint.

What do we lose if we stop being quiet as we stand in a garden and plant daisies?