Last Thursday I wrote a newsletter intending to publish it this week. It dealt with my sudden need to make something for dinner which caused me to come up with a great recipe using stuff I found growing here on the farm. I thought, “This would make a great newsletter showing how you don’t need a recipe to create a delicious meal! All you need is inspiration and great ingredients.” It included eggplant and fennel, two ingredients people have trouble utilizing. “What a great newsletter/recipe it will be!” I thought.
Alas, for whatever reason, our eggplants are slowing down considerably. We harvested 90 on Wednesday. Forty-some on Friday and 15 yesterday. Not the direction I was expecting. Typically in past seasons we’d have a couple weeks of an overabundance of eggplant and I suppose we may still have those weeks. But it won’t be this week, unless something drastically changed today while we were working on other things. So now I have to come up with a different topic and based on today’s activities I’m here to talk about potatoes!
Here at Fresh Earth Farms we grow somewhere around nine different varieties of potatoes. Why so many? The two main reasons are variety and maturity. We want our customers to enjoy different tastes and textures; who would want the same old potatoes every week? The second reason is that by selecting specific varieties with varying days to maturity we can plant all of them at the same time yet spread out the harvest over the course of the season. Genius!
The first potato we harvest, the one we harvested today, is the dark red norland. It is an early, red skin, white flesh potato that we find to be delicious and high yielding. It is a waxy potato that is great for roasting (on the grill in the summer!) and boiling. The red skin adds visual appeal for potato salads. It is delicious in one of my favorite dishes, Cauliflower and Potato Curry. I think it might be a bit too dense and moist for mashing but maybe you like “stick to the ribs” mashed potatoes. However you prepare them I think you will enjoy the freshness, something most people don’t think about when they purchase and eat potatoes.
Hey farmer Chris. Would these be “new potatoes”? And what exactly are “new potatoes”? Yes these would be new potatoes. Most people think new potatoes are small, red skinned potatoes. Not all red skinned potatoes are new potatoes and not all small potatoes are new potatoes. What makes a potato a new potato is how mature the potato is. If you pick a potato before the spuds are fully mature the skin will be thinner and the potato will be moister; this is a new potato. The potato may be small since it is harvested before the plant is mature, but being small doesn’t make a potato a new potato. It is just a small potato. You can tell a new potato from its skin. Typically the potato will have flakes of skin that have fallen off during harvest, washing or subsequent handling. The potato is still good without this skin, it just may not store as long. But since they are so delicious there is no need to store them long. So enjoy these “new potatoes”!
Other than potatoes what will we have? We still have broccoli, cauliflower, kale, chard, green onions, garlic scapes, summer squash, zucchini, cabbage, beets, some cucumbers, some eggplants, some kohlrabi (last week for kohlrabi), some lettuce and lots of fennel! We may start picking the first planting of corn this week. It isn’t ready for Wednesday but corn can mature quickly if we get warm days and nights.
We have FruitShare this week. Included will be peaches, Arctic Jay white nectarines, Dapple Dandy pluots, Red Scarlet grapes, and Duke blueberries. Delish!
We also have EggShare, CheeseShare and IceCreamShare.
Starting Friday we will be giving out SeafoodShare and SalmonShare.
FlowerShare is going strong.
The next MeatShare isn’t until August 7th.
As always please send in your questions, comments, ideas, jokes, and brain teasers.
Here is my favorite potato joke (sorry for those who have heard it before but I laugh every time).
Two potatoes are baking in a 400 degree oven. The first one says, “Boy it is hot in here.” The second one screams, “Aaaahhh, a talking potato!”