IMITATION NEW POTATOES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXIII, Issue 274, 22 November 1901, Page 2

IMITATION NEW POTATOES.

A piece of modern deception is described in Popular Science. Late in the season, after other crops are out of the way, the gardener plants a crop of late and good-keeping potatoes. The time has been chosen from experience, and is opportune for a yield of small potatoes before the frosts of winter come down upon the gardener's truck patoh. These potatoes are dug and buried in heaps in the open field, and left until spring opens and the new potato season arrives. At the proper time the heaps are opened and the potatoes sorted according to size. In the meantime a large kettle or vat is set in the field adjacent to the potato-heaps, and made ready by filling with water and adding sufficient lye to effectually curl the skin of the pocato when dipped into the boiling solution. A crane and metal baskets are rigged, so that the dipping can be done expeditiously, and the way I that new potatoes are turned out is astouishicg. The effect of dipping any potato, no matter how old, into this boiling- ]ye is to crack and cur! the skin, and at the same time it hardens or makes the potato much more firm, so that its resemblance to a new potato is so near that it would be hard to pick out the impostor, from appearance alone, from a basket of the genuine article. After dipping, the potatoes are riosed in another vat and spread out to dry in the sun and cure into (jerffct new potatoes, and the work is complete,