What’s eating the potato?

AMONG the many lovely things about flower-filled May are the early potato stalks rising ever upwards. In recent years, many people, yours truly included, have returned to vegetable-growing and there’s a primal joy in watching those hardly, little green leaves breaking through the soil.

The potato has left its mark on the landscape. The ‘lazy beds’ show the outline of ridges from the Famine. And what an unjust misnomer that is, given the honest sweat and toil involved and the horrible outcome.