Circle M Farm

Red potato, blue potato! We’ll have both those, and more, this summer, now that I’ve finally placed my seed potato order. When I ordered my vegetable seed in January I put off the potato decisions since I won’t actually plant them until the soil is thawed, whereas lots of vegetables will actually be started here in the house in a few weeks. So “Potato Order” is one more thing I can cross off my still-ridiculously-long winter to-do list. Hooray! Now I can dream of digging potatoes when I’m digging out of the snow, should we get still more –

My favorite potatoes last year were the late-season Butte russets that I lifted huge and un-blemished from the chilled November soil. The yields were good, the potatoes were tasty fresh and they are still keeping beautifully in my garage. We’ll grow those again this year. But some of the varieties I tried last year will NOT be coming back.

The Dark Red Norlands, a super-early variety highly prized for baby red market potatoes, was a huge let down in our garden because I got about three to four potatoes per plant! Absolutely devastating after the time myself and my Work Share crew spent digging trenches, backfilling as the plants grew, mulching, squashing potato beetles and weeding. Not to mention forking those disappointing little piles out of the rich black soil. I’m substituting Chieftain as my early red variety this year, which will mature a bit later, but give us more, hopefully.

Purple Majesty was another early variety that disappointed us in yield last year, so we’ll go with Caribe this time around, a purple-skinned variety that will also be ready later but produce more. Caribe has creamy white flesh, a bit dry and good for mashing and baking both. We’ll also plant an early russet variety called Gold Rush that’s waxy and should be great for boiling. For early summer, I’m especially excited for Satina, which has satiny yellow skin and dark yellow flesh that make mashed potatoes that already look and taste buttered! Yum!

Later in summer, we’ll be eating All Blue, a blue through-and-through potato we’ve enjoyed for three years in a row. The purple tubers taste great and make a stunning salad! But imagine how great they’ll be tossed in a vinaigrette with beet-red Huckleberry potatoes. Their red and white marbled flesh is smooth, and suited to roasting, boiling or steaming. We’re dropping Carola, last year’s mid-season yellow potato, because it also gave us very few potatoes per plant. This year we’ll try Yellow Finn, a baking potato with distinctive flattened pear-shaped tubers. These will be challenging to harvest, as they tend to develop on stolons a ways out from the plant. Not my favorite prospect for harvesting, but the potatoes, which I’ve not grown before, sound well worth it.

For late season potatoes, we’ll do Buttes again. They were just a delight when we dug them, after so many disappointing early potato crops last year. We’ll also grow Red Cloud, a fluffy red-skinned mashing potato with exceptional storage quality, and Red Pontiac, a very sweet potato that has to be planted close or it grows too large.

Last year I planted three varieties of fingerling potatoes – long, thin, often waxy gourmet potatoes that I intended to be knock-out gems in our CSA boxes. They were three times the price of regular seed potatoes, but I thought they’d be worth it for a treat. The skinny tubers were certainly beautiful at harvest – especially the Rose Finn Apples that were golden colored with pink knobs along their sides – but I pulled a disappointing average of 4 fingerlings from under each plant, and most were rather thin. A few of our customers got a few of those pretty potatoes. So we’re dropping them for this year, too. I guess there is a theme to this year’s potato plan – bigger! more! – we definitely want to get more return on our investment in the soil and plants.

This really is a significant change from my previous give-all-the-coolest-stuff-a-try mindset. I guess I’m becoming less of an avid gardener and more of a farmer – I hope so, anyway! Farming of any sort is an endless adventure in evaluation, with so many variables it’s hard to imagine ever maintaining a status quo. Potatoes are a good example – as each year goes by, we find a few new varieties we can more or less count on, and find a few more things that just aren’t worth doing. We are very gradually learning to evaluate every aspect of our homestead in this way, from growing lamb for meat to selling wool for spinning to teaching fiber art classes. Up until this winter, it seems we’ve been willing to give pretty much anything a try, and many things simultaneously, but we are learning to edit, as we say in the language of journalism. Or prune, as you’d say in the language of horticulture. Or weed. That’s just what we are learning to do here on this farm – weed out those crops and tasks that don’t produce a good harvest for us. No more small potatoes! Next on the winter to-do list: evaluate the profitability of the hens and meat birds and place the spring order for them.