One Potato, Two Potato Recipes:
by Joe and Dennis Fisher My grandfather was an Aroostook County potato farmer. With my father and uncle he raised Green Mountains, Katahdins, Kennebecs, and even a few Idaho Russets. At one time they owned two farms and hundreds of acres, raising up to 250 barrels of potatoes per acre.
This is a long way from the 20 by 70 foot plot we planted this spring, but you could still say that potato farming is in the blood. As I prepare to dig and store this year's crop, I have no doubt that generations of Fishers are looking over my shoulders, and being pretty critical of my technique.
This year we grew NY-L-235-4, a "bugless" variety from Cornell. This is not one of the recent crop of transgenic potatoes that contain BT and are not considered organic by MOFGA. Instead, NY-L-235-4 was produced by traditional plant breeding methods. The potato was bred back with its original Andean ancestors to produce a hairy leafed variety that repels insects. It works very well against leafhoppers and Colorado potato beetles. I still had to handpick potato beetles and larvae off the plants from time to time, but not as often as with other varieties.
NY-L-235-4 is perhaps not the best "new" potato, but is good baked or mashed, and the flavor of the spuds seemed to improve as the season progressed; and may even get better in storage.
Planting our NY-L-235-4 spuds was a pretty simple operation. I bought a fifty pound bag of seed potatoes from Fedco at their plant sale this spring. Since the potatoes were small and a bit past their prime, we decided not to cut them but to plant them whole. The plot was a fairly lean patch of soil where a cover crop of winter rye had recently been tilled under. I made four beds with a grape hoe and dug a hole about every 18 inches. In these we placed a generous helping of rough compost mixed with rotted sod, and one potato.
When the tops were a foot high, we mounded them up with a hiller attachment on our rototiller. Later we mulched the plants heavily with hay. These plants were never irrigated even in this extremely dry year. We started digging the potatoes when they were small and still had a high sugar-to-starch ratio (new potato sized) but the bulk of them were left to mature as storage potatoes for eating all winter. These will be dug and left in the sun for a few days to cure, then stored in barrels in the cellar.
Potatoes are an almost perfect food. Just two of them will supply an entire day's requirement of Vitamin C. They are an excellent source of high quality protein, fiber, iron, potassium and other necessary nutrients. Potatoes are second only to broccoli in the number of cancer fighting antioxidants they contain. A person could live quite well on potatoes alone, and viewed in this light it seems that the meat-and-potato diet my grandfather enjoyed every day of his life was not such a bad one after all.
The one great failing of potatoes is their susceptibility to disease. Modern agribusiness uses some of the most potent poisons known to man to curb the scabs and blights and worms that routinely attack potatoes. This is in addition to the herbicides used to control weeds and kill the potato tops. In this sense small diversified farms have the advantage, because rotation with other crops prevents the buildup of diseases in the soil.
In addition to their enormous nutritive value, potatoes are a natural storage crop, and provide more food per acre than any other. If you want your garden to supply a substantial part of your food, grow potatoes. They can be prepared in a vast number of ways, and are increasingly popular as a gourmet food, as people discover the multifold colors and subtle flavors and textures of the hundreds of different potato varieties now grown.
Consider the varieties available at our farmer's market. Beth Haines of Peacemeal Farm is showing that excellent potatoes can be grown organically. She has Yukon Golds, a fine, buttery yellow-fleshed potato, Red Norlands, and Katahdins. She recommends Yukons or Katahdins for frying.
Chase Farm planted 550 pounds of seed potatoes this spring. They are marketing a rich diversity of such evocatively named types as Peanut, Fingerling, Rose Fin Apple, Austrian Crescent, Russian Banana, Elba, Caribe, Ononway, Carola, Frontier, Rose Gold, and Kranz, a good russet variety. Meg Chase's favorite is Carola, but she says she "likes em all."
Scalloped Potato with Ham and Tomato
Scalloped potatoes, with onion and cheese, are a classic New England dish. This isn't the ancestral version, but a lighter descendant spiced up with garlic and ham. Just the thing on a chilly fall evening.
- 2 ? pounds baking potatoes, sliced
- 4 cloves garlic, chopped
- ? pound baked ham, cubed
- 1 ? cups tomato sauce, preferably homemade
- 8 ounces shredded Mozzarella, cheddar and Jack cheese
- 2 cups half-and-half or light cream
Preheat oven to 350. Butter a 9 x 13 inch baking dish. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and parboil the potatoes until barely tender. Drain the potatoes and layer half of them in the pan. Add the garlic, tomato sauce and ham, then the rest of the potatoes. Sprinkle with cheese and add cream. Bake 45 minutes, until cheese is browned and potatoes are done. Serves 6.
The Belfast Farmer's Market will be open at Reny's Plaza through the end of October, Tuesdays 2:30-5:30 and Fridays and Saturdays 9-1. Then starting on November 6, we will move to our winter quarters in the new Belfast Agway. We will hold our market there on Saturdays, 10-1, until mid-December.