The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  Other people seemed to have no trouble growing the things. The trouble was, the few times I had taken a stab at potato raising, I’d met abject failure.

  At my most creative, I’d planted potatoes in an inverted trash can, the bottom cut off. I heaped dirt in it as the vines grew with promising luxuriance, supposedly ensuring layers upon layers of meaty potatoes. I imagined eventually slipping the garbage can up off the cone of dirt and therein finding hundreds of potatoes for my efforts. The reality of it is, lush foliage does not mean lots of potatoes. Sam and I combed through the dirt and came up with hardly anything. The math? Two pounds of sprouted potatoes plus months of water and care resulted in a handful of marble-sized baby spuds.

  Why, oh why couldn’t I grow potatoes? Some guy in Lebanon had grown a twenty-five-pound potato. I wasn’t expecting that, I just thought it would be nice to get a tuber that was bigger than a ping-pong ball.

  Driving through the Central Valley in June, I was mocked by the thousands, maybe millions, of potato bags heaving full with spuds pulled from the pale soil. I knew those potato plants hadn’t had the attention I’d lavished on my own. Why were those potatoes so eager to reproduce? More to the point, why weren’t my potatoes doing it?

  My mother grew potatoes. One of my sweetest childhood memories was of my mom making me homegrown baby potatoes and creamed peas for dinner on my birthday in early August. Come to think of it, I do only remember baby potatoes, not big ones . . . and those didn’t come around much more often than my birthday. Perhaps my inability to grow potatoes was genetic.

  But then I talked to a friend of mine who worked at the farmers’ market (and was therefore privy to real farming advice), and I got an inkling that perhaps my problem wasn’t so much a lack of potato-growing DNA as much as it was a lack of information. He said he was going to plant his garden potatoes when the farmers around Davis put their potatoes in the ground—in February.

  My mind reeled. It is cold in February. I always planted my potatoes in the summer, not spring, and certainly not in the winter. But then I thought about the bags and bags of jumbo-sized potatoes already collected in the fields by June and decided I needed to educate myself.

  The first step in my education was to master the vocabulary of growing potatoes. Whereas chitting is the process of exposing potatoes to warmth and light to encourage their eyes to sprout, suberizing is what happens when the potato seals off the cuts that come from being divided, or the wounds and skin damage acquired during harvest.

  Both haulms and shaws refer to the potato leaves and stalks. Round seed is an uncut potato used for planting. Seedpiece, on the other hand, is a cut section of a potato with one or more eyes that is used for planting. Seedpiece breakdown refers to the seedpiece rotting due to waterlogged dirt and/or the potato not having been allowed to suberize.

  Tubers were what I was aiming for—enlarged underground stems, the part of the potato plant that’s edible.

  As I familiarized myself with the world of the potato, I found that almost everything that I thought I knew about potatoes was wrong. Even though potatoes are related to tobacco and tomatoes, a family of plants that appreciate summer heat, my sense that potatoes were torridweather proliferators couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

  Instead, potatoes are a cool season crop. Not surprising to the people who know that potatoes first hailed from the Andes at an elevation of around 12,500 feet above sea level. The 8,000 years that the Peruvians have been eating potatoes have been put to good use. The International Potato Center in Lima maintains a tuber collection of over 4,500 types of potatoes. In the United States, however, over ninety percent of the potatoes we eat come from only twelve varieties.

  While Ireland does not have a potato center, they are another famous lover of the potato and yet another cool-weather bastion. The difference between the height of summer and the depth of winter in Ireland can be a tiny thirty-degree difference in the temperature of the rain. No matter where you hearken from, you can plant the round seed or suberized seed pieces of the potato when the ground temperature is a mere 45 degrees. Potatoes do best when the air temperatures are 60 to 75 degrees during the day and 45 to 55 degrees during the night.

  No wonder my garbage can idea didn’t work. Not only was it late June and 80 to 90 degrees during the day when I planted the potatoes in the garbage can (potato yields are highest when daytime temperatures are about 69 degrees), but the garbage can was a solarizing black on top of it. The temperature inside the Rubbermaid barrel must have been in baking range—certainly much higher than the 85 degree soil temperatures at which potatoes stop producing. Whoops.

  I also believed that a potato needed lots of water initially to encourage the sprout and help the plant get a good start, just like seeds need to be kept moist in order to germinate. Instead, during the first stage of potato growth, the danger is of the seedpiece rotting from being too wet. This dooms the plant to failure since the seedpiece is the sole source of energy for the sprout until it emerges from the soil. Generally, although the dirt is damp when the potatoes are planted, no water is given for about two weeks until the green tip of the potato pokes out of the dirt. Whoops again.

  In the second stage of growth, lasting from one to two months, the potato’s vegetation forms and then (in some varieties but not all) it blooms. I thought that when a potato plant bloomed it was signaling that it was done with its work. After all, if a carrot or parsnip blooms, it means the plant is likely old and inedible beneath the ground. Instead, the blooming potato (or, for those varieties that don’t bloom, the densely leafed potato) signals a time of tuber set and tuber initiation. While in the past I stopped watering at this point, this was actually the time when the potato needs the most water of all. Whoops three times.

  Finally, the vines turn yellow and lose their leaves. When photosynthesis decreases, tuber growth naturally slows down and watering should be stopped. The tubers are left in the dry ground for two to three weeks, giving the potato skins time to toughen a bit before they are dug up.

  Now that I was armed with knowledge, what I needed were seed potatoes. I bought some beautiful organic ones at the farmers’ market. (The vendors at our farmers’ market must grow what they sell, so buying locally grown potatoes meant they grew well in this area.) If you don’t know your local potato grower, it is a good idea to buy seed potatoes from a source that can verify they are disease free and not inoculated with a substance (synthetic hormone) that inhibits sprouting.

  I cut the largest potatoes into pieces that were no smaller than a golf ball, with at least two eyes. I allowed the pieces to suberize, or heal, which I now knew was done through the potato’s formation of suberin (a waxy substance that functions to prevent water from penetrating the surface. Cork, interestingly, consists mainly of suberin).

  I put the potatoes on the windowsill to “chit” (if you recall, chitting means to place in warm light to get the eyes to sprout). They quickly turned green, which is fine for a seed potato but is something you don’t want to happen with your eating potatoes since the green indicates the presence of alkaloids (solanine and chaconine) in the skin, both of which are poisonous.

  When February finally rolled slooooooowly and greyly around, I planted healthy seedpieces in the rich, well-draining soil in one of my raised beds.

  Some years, of course, have colder, wetter conditions in February that might not be ideal for starting potatoes that early. Some places have heavier soils, which can facilitate rot. So how does one know?

  It is almost impossible to find every potato when you dig up the beds. There are always a few that get left in the dirt. I expect that they will rot, but they often come up the next year as volunteers. They are excellent markers. When I see the first leaves of the volunteers, I know that the time to plant new potatoes is now (though not in the same place).

  In subsequent years of growing potatoes, it is important to change the location of your potato plants in order to sidestep the possibility of plant disea
ses. Potatoes are as beloved by fungi as they are by people. Early blight, late blight, wilt, black scurf, Rhizoctonia canker, and silver scurf, to name a few types of spud-crazy fungi, would all love to have their way with your potatoes before you get a chance to shred them into hash. These fungi hang out in the soil and if you plant where they’ve got a start (from a previous season’s planting), they will attack their host plants with a vengeance. Suffice to say, it won’t be pretty. This is the same reason you don’t want to plant tomatoes, eggplant, or even tobacco in the same area either; they are all vulnerable to the same funguses and diseases.

  My second year of potatoes seemed to be doing fine. I hoped I’d got the timing right by planting early. I followed up the early planting by watering as recommended. The leaves of the potatoes grew luxuriant and tall, and then the plant blossomed. Of course, I knew better than to believe that meant bushels of potatoes were burgeoning out of sight. I held my expectations in check and continued watering as the blossoming continued. When the leaves yellowed I withheld water . . . and waited, allowing the potatoes that might have grown (or might not have) to toughen. I must admit, the two weeks that followed were suspenseful indeed . . . I may even have dug around just a bit hoping to come across a small patch of witch spoor, but I was disappointed. Had I failed again?

  When the toughening period ended, I took out my pitchfork (using a pitchfork cuts down the likelihood that you will slice into a potato) and turned over the earth. The bad news was that I didn’t get a twenty-five-pound potato, but I did get more than twenty-five pounds of potatoes in total. And a good number of them were fist-sized tubers. This, for me, was practically a miracle.

  In the meantime, my hens had been churning out eggs. And so for our personal potato day celebration, we made Jesse’s favorite childhood meal.

  Recipe

  Potatoes and Eggs

  For most of Jesse’s childhood, potatoes and eggs was a weekly dinner. It started out as a cost-saving meal but became a dinner of choice, especially for a skinny freckled child who could put away more potatoes and eggs than seemed anatomically possible.

  I have to say, cooking potatoes was a job fraught with difficulties for me. The sliced potatoes would get gummy, the eggs would be like rubber, or the potatoes would be crunchy. One would think that coming from the meat and potatoes family of my childhood I would be able to fry up some spuds blindfolded.

  No matter the problems I had with them, Jesse ate each and every permutation of potatoes and eggs, leading me to believe he would eat anything (I found that this wasn’t true on the day we ran out of tomato sauce and I substituted ketchup on Jesse’s pizza).

  I never added ketchup to eggs, but I did eventually discover the best way to make potatoes and eggs—at least for me.

  Ingredients: • 4 potatoes

  • 6 eggs

  • 1 cup chopped green onions (or more, depending on your taste)

  • salt and pepper to taste

  • 1 dash cayenne (optional)

  • 1 healthy glug of olive oil

  1. Cut the raw potatoes (as many or as few as you’d like, really) into half-inch cubes, toss with copious amounts of sliced green onions and a goodly amount of salt (potatoes beg for salt), a dash of pepper, and enough olive oil to coat the mixture.

  2. Either spread the mixture on a cookie sheet (use a Silpat baking mat or parchment paper to make cleanup easier) and roast the potatoes in a preheated 400 degree oven, or toss them into a frying pan and sauté them on the stovetop, which has the added advantage of one less dish to clean.

  3. Beat the eggs with a splash of milk until foamy.

  4. When the potatoes have browned on a couple of sides, arrange them evenly in the hot skillet and pour the egg mixture over them. You want to treat the eggs gently.

  5. Turn down the heat and cook the potatoes and eggs a few minutes on a medium-low burner, then stick the skillet under the broiler on low until the eggs, though cooked, are still quite moist.

  6. Remove skillet from broiler, let sit for a few minutes, and season with salt, pepper, and/or cayenne before serving (for breakfast burritos, serve with warm tortillas and salsa).

  Recipe

  Alotta Frittata

  Potatoes and eggs continued to be one of my favored dishes when I started the Quarter-Acre Farm project, especially when the fowl hit their (re)productive strides. The two chickens would lay two eggs a day, the duck one every other day, and while Jeannette was responsible for only about two dozen a year, they were enormous eggs. (Sometimes people ask us if we aren’t tempted to let Jeannette and Goosteau hatch their eggs. While I admit a gosling is about the most endearing baby animal on the planet, the idea of more Goosteaus and Jeannettes rampaging across the Quarter-Acre Farm is enough to make me dizzy with dread.)

  However, as the potatoes proved to be a problem (ahem) for me to grow, I started sneaking other vegetables into the potatoes and eggs mix: pea shoots, chard, broccoli, fava greens, sugar peas, spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, green onions, and garlic to name a few—sometimes even leaving out the potatoes altogether and adding different kinds of cheeses to the egg mixture. To reflect these fancy-pants changes, we started using the fancy-pants word for the resulting dish: frittata. Who wouldn’t love frittata when it rhymes so well with alotta? (Oh, imagine eating alotta ricotta frittata!) Okay, my boys don’t think it’s as funny as I do. However, they still love frittatas.

  Ingredients: • 6 to 12 cups chopped vegetables (½ to 1 cup per egg)

  • 12 eggs

  • 1 cup shredded Romano cheese (or other cheese of choice)

  • milk (as needed)

  • salt and pepper to taste

  • a dash of seasonings (whatever you prefer—thyme, tarragon, rosemary, cayenne, etc.)

  1. I use a lot of vegetables in our frittatas. To me, the eggs in the best frittatas are less of a main component than a flavorful “glue” to keep all the greens stuck together. And one key to a good frittata is to cook whatever vegetables you are using previous to adding the egg. If you are sautéing them in the frittata pan, cook them in the order of time they take to cook. That is, you don’t want to throw the chard into the pan at the same time as the broccoli florettes. The chard will be over-done or the broccoli won’t be done enough. Either start with the florettes and cook until almost tender before adding, say, snap peas; or blanch/roast/steam the heavy stuff like broccoli, cauliflower, or potatoes ahead of time.

  2. Beat the eggs and milk just until the yolks and whites are barely incorporated. I treat my egg “glue” with great gentleness so that the egg component doesn’t actually resemble glue (or rubber) when I eat it.

  3. Fold in the cheese and any other seasonings you might want to use (I use salt and pepper of course, but also maybe some tarragon, or some rosemary or thyme).

  4. Pour the egg mixture over the cooked vegetables in the hot skillet and wait a couple of minutes (with the burner turned to low).

  5. Put the pan under the broiler set to low. Let cook for the time it takes for the eggs to set (approximately 5-15 minutes depending on the size of your pan and the depth of your frittata). As with the eggs and potatoes, the frittata should appear slightly underdone when you pull it from the oven because the eggs will continue to cook for a few minutes once out of the hot stove.

  6. Let the frittata cool a bit before serving, or let it cool a lot, because the dish is delicious at room temperature.

  Note: Frittata makes a wonderful picnic entree, so the next time you are heading out to a public concert to listen to, say, a cantata, or you’re going to the river where you’ll perhaps see a regatta, you know what you need to make alotta of.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MAGICAL FRUIT

  “I like refried beans. That’s why I wanna try fried beans, because maybe they’re just as good and we’re just wasting time.”

  —MITCH HEDBERG

  If potatoes are good stick-to-your-ribs food, then their cousins in the basic fill-you-up food genre are beans.


  Why grow beans? You can buy enough legumes to fill a city’s worth of burritos for less than it costs one person to eat at the French Laundry. Further, they require a lot of steps to grow and harvest. Unlike say, zucchini or tomatoes, you have to not only grow and pick the beans, but also dry them, remove them from their pods, and thresh and clean them, all before preparing them to eat. Taking these vegetables from a naked seed that you poke into the soil all the way through its growth cycle to become yet another naked seed, which you then poke into a stockpot (hopefully with quite a few of its brothers), is no small task.

  If I hadn’t decided to grow 75 percent of my food in my yard, and I hadn’t worried that buying beans might have meant giving up a wedge of Mt. Tam cheese, I wouldn’t have used my garden space for something I could buy for pennies. And what a shame that would have been.

  As it was, I almost didn’t get to discover what a treat homegrown beans actually are. I planted my beans in a bed that was apparently slated for the construction of a sow bug city-state. As my beans grew, the sow bug citizens munched down on every bit of pale tender shoot that poked out of the earth. Yes I know sow bugs (a.k.a. roly polies) aren’t supposed to eat living plants. They are supposed to be the vultures of the garden world, chowing down on the dead. Apparently some of the crustacean-looking fellows like both. Apparently a lot of them like both.