June 2009: Potatoes, more root vegetables and wild leaf vegetables.

Let me share a little bit of my history with potatoes. In high school, one of my first explorations into vegetable gardening involved several rows of seed potatoes I planted on some family land we have. Very few of the seed potatoes ever grew up out of the soil, but out of the one or two that did, I think I only managed to get a single potato that was smaller than a golf ball. Undeterred, I dutifully took it home, and boiled and mashed it. I added no salt, no butter, no nothin, and it was the best, most amazing flavorful potato I'd ever tasted. (You normally think of potatoes as bland, starchy vehicles of other flavors.) In some ways, I can credit that potato with much of my faith in and fascination with local, homegrown food. That said, when I planted potatoes this spring, they were following in really big foot steps, so they had to be good.

Here was the remants of a plant:

And here is some of what I harvested by digging up all those plants (definitely the most labor-intensive thing I've had to harvest to date) . . .


When I cooked all of them, they were delicious -- they didn't disappoint. So it confirmed what I experienced in high school: homegrown potatoes are surprisingly flavorful. If I were to recommend people grow one or two things for themselves, this has to be one of the most rewarding by comparison of flavor to the store-bought alternatives . . . right up there with tomatoes I think.

Here were the blue potatoes that I planted (and harvested) later . . . for no particular reason, other than they came in the mail later. Apparently the seed company (in New Mexico!) is on a Yankee planting calendar . . .
Here are a few of the tiny blue potatoes with some red potatoes and a radish:

Sweet potatoes are one thing I've not had a chance to plant yet, but I had this store-bought one that went bad while we were out of town, so I decided to reconstitute its purpose and plant it. I started it in water, like a elementary school project. Then I moved it out to the garden, where I've proceeded to neglect it, but despite all the heat and drought, it still remains.


None of the carrot seeds I planted in the spring sprouted, but I did get these from plants leftover from the fall:
I also started harvesting lots of onions, shallots, and garlic in June:

Beets were another root vegetable we had:

These are two different varieties, but the one on the left is the Chioggia I sliced for display below . . .

And there was a tiny bit of kale left . . .

More lettuce blooms:

And the amaranth kept growing . . .