From kūmara-geddon to tuber heaven

News Item: Growers celebrate kūmara comeback

Kūmara grower Doug Nilsson is celebrating a kūmara bonanza 100 times greater than last year. Nilsson said kūmara and New Zealand belong together: “It’s a bit like the All Blacks. It’s part of New Zealand’s taonga. It’s always been part of your diet. If you’ve got meat and veges on your plate and there’s not a kūmara among them, it’s not finished is it? You send the cook back to get a kūmara. Otherwise he’s the one who sucks the kūmara!” Northern Advocate, 7/05/24

The kūmara is the root that rates upon our human dinner-plates. It ‘boots’ other veges like puha and sedges it sure out-points cold peas and ‘tates’.

The kūmara, indeed, is part of our fabric.

Its roots (cf. swedes), are state-ofart magic.

Whether orange or purple any old twerp ’ll slurp ’em like snappers snap gurnards pelagic.

They’re a bit like the All Blacks, you see.

They’re part of our back-history: Dargaville taonga to boggle Taurangans down south in the Bay of Plenty . . . where for plentiful root-crops they lack so the chefs there don’t get a fair crack at gourmet delights as gourmands, in spite send the cooks to their kitchens straight back.

Yes, the kūmara’s with Kaipara synonymous: just ask true-blue Ruawai agronomists.

They’re as sweet as the waters that sweep their drowned quarters in storm-clouds with warning-signs ominous . . . such as last year’s lashings by Gabrielle so disastrous to farmers nigh felled as they gazed in dismay at displacements from clay of a crop far too rooted to sell. But, the travails are now left behind — cultivators no more in a bind as bins overflow with roots over-grown and the weather for croppers is kind.

Tony Clemow Te Kamo