Cycles of food

(Today's StoryADay prompt was to shape a story around a theme. I've finally gotten back into the mood to write about our burgeoning backyard farm, so I already had potatoes in mind.)

Sorting potatoes in our garage (Photo by Jim Gupta-Carlson)

The past few weeks have felt like the beginning of a new year: My husband Jim and I have been trying to clear out the old to make way for the new. Specifically, we are looking at our stockpiles of food frozen, stored, or canned away from last summer's harvest in order to assess what remains to be eaten as we embark on spring plantings.

Today the project was potatoes. The cool weather crops -- those able to survive the kind of light frost that we still are in danger of getting through mid-May -- have been put into the ground. The hot weather crops -- solanaceous plants such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and squash -- are in seedling trays or temporary pots until their scheduled transplants in early June. The first of the greens -- tatsoi, baby bok choi, spinach that overwintered, and a few stray strands of green garlic -- along with our first cutting of asparagus are gracing our dinner plants. It is now time to prepare one of our fields to plant potatoes.

For the past three years, we have purchased what are known as seed potatoes from either a local farmer or the well-known Johnny Seeds supplier. Last summer, however, we had an unusually abundant crop of potatoes and that, coupled with a decision to stockpile some Viking Gold and Adirondack Blue purple potatoes that we did not grow, has given us more than enough tubers to plant this year's crop.

Quick back-story: potatoes grow out of sprouts that form in the "eyes" of existing spuds. A sprout from one eye will produce anywhere from two to seven new potatoes, each of which will have at least one eye upon it. Most potatoes have several eyes, which create multiple opportunities to sprout. As a result, one of our goals in sorting potatoes this afternoon was to find those with the most number of eyes.

That didn't take long. We stored our potatoes from last summer's crop in thirty-gallon aluminum cans filled with peat moss. For the most part, the peat moss created a dry, cool and dark environment that kept our potatoes firm and the sprouting to a minimum. Still, potatoes -- like any fresh-stored vegetable -- continue to live even in storage so after six months of storage it's not unusual to find small sprouts attached to the potatoes. We selected about 100 potatoes -- a mix of gold, red, white, and purple varieties -- for our spring planting and were happy to discover that we still have an additional one hundred or so pounds remaining to eat until the new harvest arrives.

From potatoes, our attention shifted to garlic and peas. Last year also was a bountiful year for our garlic patch. The harvest yielded some 400 bulbs, about 80 of which we saved for this year. Because garlic is planted typically in the fall, we sowed this year's garlic patch in November. As the snow melted, fresh green tips began sprouting from the ground, a sign that the garlic had successfully over-wintered and was ready to grow from the individual cloves sowed in the fall into full bulbs by early summer. However, the snow melt also produced another surprise: a series of "volunteer" garlic plants -- small tender stalks that either did not sprout in the previous spring or somehow were missed in our harvest. Because the volunteers are residing in the space slated for this year's potatoes, I decided to pull them up to use as what's called "green garlic" -- a particularly pungent yet small stalk that carries a sharp, early-spring hint of the harvest to come.

In the meantime, peas that had fallen from drying pods into the ground began sprouting up. Ecstatic, I fished out the jar in which I had stored peas saved from the previous summer to plant alongside them.

These are just a few of our crops from last summer that will hopefully yield new harvests this year. Also in storage still are cans of hot salsa, ketchup, and peaces. The freezer still holds a few samplings of squash, green beans, and pesto. A cloth bin is filled with pods of black, white, and red beans still to be shelled -- some of which will be planted in the middle of June. And in aluminum cans, nestled in peat moss in dark, dry, cool conditions akin to those of the potatoes are carrots and beets. My goal is for us to finish off all of these treats before fresh ones arrive.