Norway's oldest potato record is a side note (1757) #shorts

On 31 May 1757, customs clerk Niels Aalholm wrote in his garden notebook at Hove, on Tromøy near Arendal, that he had "observeret Potatoes at opkomme" (observed potatoes coming up), on the same line as a note that he sowed sugar peas for the second time. The Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO) calls it the first known document of potato growing for food in Norway. It is the earliest dated written record, not proof that he was first: the notebook's 1907 editor noted that he writes of potatoes like old acquaintances, so he was probably growing them already.
Sources: Toldskriver Niels Aalholms Optegnelser… 1757-1775 (ed. Finne-Grønn, 1907), pp. 17, 44-45, https://slaegtsbibliotek.dk/910681.pdf ; NIBIO, https://www.nibio.no/tema/mat/plantegenetiske-ressurser/kulturplanter-i-norge/jordbruksplanter/potet/tromoypotet ; KUBEN, https://www.kubenarendal.no/hove/tromoypoteten.html

Full sleep story (43 min, Hove, Tromøy, 1757): https://youtu.be/CeWP1098wmo
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Images created with Grok (AI-generated artistic impressions).
Narration voice generated with Parler-TTS (Hugging Face, Apache-2.0), trained on LibriTTS-R and Multilingual LibriSpeech (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
The narration is AI-generated and the scenes are dramatised; the dates, places and quoted records are real (sources above).
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