Planting garlic in the fall ties up the circle of the cycle of the farm year. There is a linear quality to most of our year, beginning with spring, growing with summer, and finishing up with fall, but garlic is exceptional. Garlic begins in the fall. Garlic is the only crop that we save our own seed for each year. We have added new varieties some years, but for the most part, this years garlic is a direct descendent of seed we began with fourteen years ago. Each bulb of garlic is made up of several smaller pieces, cloves, and each clove, when planted will grow another entire bulb exactly like the first. Farmers refer to them as mother bulbs and daughter cloves, and the garlic is a nine month gestation baby of a crop, planted in the fall, harvested in the summer. Each years crop an extension of the crop before and the one before that, like Russian nesting dolls. It is good for us to plant now, as we head into the resting and dark of the year. There is a certain sadness this time of year, of letting go, of ending. A sigh of relief, also. And a great sense of hope and obligation to the future when planting the nine month babies of garlic. We certainly will be doing this all again next year. We commit to our land, each other, to all of you, with every clove we push into the soil, we commit to do it all again, each season an extension of the one that came before.

Todays Russet potato is likely a Canela or Russet Nugget, as those are the two varieties we planted this year. This would be the one to wrap in foil and bake. Russet= Baked potato. It’s just that simple. There is another variety called Russet Burbank, and that is the big one, the grand daddy of all the baked potatoes and French fries in the whole world. The Russet Burbank is the most widely grown potato in the U.S., most of them in Idaho. We didn’t like them when we grew them a few years back. But, the schools wanted some. So we said OK, we’ll grow some for you. Turns out they are good. The school kitchen wanted 350 potatoes the size of a fist. So we washed and sorted out the ones larger and smaller than that, and delivered exactly what they wanted. We can be very responsive that way, good followers of instructions we are. Some of you will get the ones that were too small, some the ones that were too large and some mixed sizes. If you get the bitty ones, I suggest baked potato appetizers with dollops of sour cream and a bit of bacon on top. Cute! Tasty!

Why do potatoes make good detectives?
Because they keep their eyes peeled.