But this isn’t a health blog, it is a gardening blog, so lets talk about gardening.

I’ve grown cabbage, and it works, but critters get into it like crazy. Slugs, ground hogs, rabbits. When it gets damaged it ruins the head, and you have only 1 head per plant. Plus, cabbage is has a little less nutritional density compared to the other cruciferous vegetables, and it is really cheap at the store so why not just buy it? I always try to consider cost when planting something, since I have limited space, I want the most bang for my buck.

I’ve grown brocolli, but it takes a long time to grow, needs sun, and has a very specific harvesting window. You have to harvest it at the perfect time when the florets have formed, but not formed too much. If you wait it gets really bitter. You also have some critter risk, if it gets damaged prior to full maturity, there isn’t much you can salvage.

I’ve grown brussels sprouts, and they took a really really long time to grow, and there were some critter issues, but mostly they tasted horrible. I guess I did it wrong or something, but they were so incredibly bitter, we couldn’t eat them, and we like brussels sprouts. I cook them a couple times a week – but I buy them at the store.

I’ve tried growing cauliflower, it also takes a long time to form, and you have to do things like tie up the leaves over the head, sounds like work. I have never had to do it though because my plants have never gotten heads.

Then I come to Kale. Kale grows very fast, because you’re not harvesting a flower or a fruit, you’re harvesting mere leaves. You can harvest it all through the growing season, taking leaves as needed, while letting the plant live to keep making more. Critters like it just as much as the other ones, but if they eat a leaf, no big deal, there are more. If a cabbage looper eats a hole through the leaf, no big deal, there is more leaf left. I rarely harvest a leaf without a hole in it, but it is still good. The other ones all produce a single head (more or less) per plant, and if it is ruined, it is ruined. But Kale plants can produce dozens and dozens of leaves.

If you plant a row of brocolli you best love it, because you’ll be eating it nonstop when it is in season. But if you plant a row of kale you can harvest it all summer long, even into fall since it will tolerate cold and frost. For the home gardener who has only limited room, that is very efficient.

Due to the wrinkles in the leaves store bought Kale has a reputation of holding onto pesticides, but at home you can just not use them (and again, who cares about a little leaf damage, so long as the plant keeps producing). So that is another reason to grow at home.

So you think, fine, I can grow it, but what would I cook with it? I love Kale because it is so versatile in the kitchen. You can add it to anything, it even holds up very well in soups (as anyone who has had Olive Garden’s Zuppa Toscana knows). I add kale, chopped up, to the following: any casserole, any soup, eggs, stirfry, sloppy joes, any pasta dish, pizza, macaroni and cheese, any skillet dish. It is great for kids who don’t like vegetables because you can just sneak it in.

For all these reasons, kale will always have a place in my garden, and I recommend you put some in yours too.

So, an Oak Park (Detroit suburb) woman is facing jailtime for planting vegetables in here front yard. I take personal offense at this because I have advocated for growing your own food and front yard farming.

As I’ve mentioned before many cities have really archaic ordinances on the books about what you can do with your yard. And God forbid you live in a Homeowner’s Association full of people who just can’t mind their own business. Often the laws have to do with grass coverage. Grass being the most useless and most resource intensive thing you can possibly plant. It needs more water, more fertilizer, and of course more mowing, than traditional gardens. It is very wasteful. All grass really has going for it is it makes a good play surface. But who wants their kids playing in the front yard by the road? I know I don’t.

So this poor women, who is only trying to combat ridiculous high food prices thanks to other misguided government policies, planted a garden in her front yard. Maybe because the back yard is full, maybe because the back yard is shady, maybe because she wanted to share and be social with her neighbors. Most of her neighbors like it, and people are voicing support online. But the pencil pushers at city hall are taking her to court, wasting even more taxpayer dollars.

Michigan cities all over the state are having budget problems. Laying off police or fire fighters, not fixing pot holes, etc. I wonder how much Oak Park pays to have the “grass police” drive around writing tickets. Now sure, no one likes a house overgrown with weeds. Those weeds can go to seed and infect the whole neighborhood, and it can bring down housing values, no one likes that. But a house with a garden in front is a homeowner who cares, it shows character, and to me would make the street seem safer. A garden is not an eye sore, and should not be treated as such.

If Detroit really wanted to get their act together they should bulldoze the tens of thousands of abandoned buildings and turn all that space into urban gardens, where everyone can grow food. In fact, imagine if the whole country planted food in their front yard? Imagine all the extra food we would suddenly be producing.

Highway medians, roadsides, parks, but mostly, front yards.

Some backwards and oppressive cities have ordinances requiring you to have x percentage of front yard as perfectly green lawn, and if you try to put in garden beds, xeriscaping, or just don’t remember to water, they fine you.

Garden beds require less fertilizer, less water, and less labor than lawn, and can make you money when used right. Sure, kids can’t play in gardens like they can on lawns, but unless you live on a very low traffic street, you want them playing in the back yard anyways. On my street, which is 4 lanes, I put in a new super secure gate as soon as my son learned to walk just to make sure he can never go into the front yard.

So, assuming you don’t live in a third reich city and can plant your front yard as you wish, why not get rid of the grass and put in planter beds? On a side note, I think it is funny the same sort of people who put in the stupid lawn ordinances are the types who act like chicken littles about food shortages.

My front yard is full of planting beds and I add a new one or two every year (it is almost an addiction for me).

I grow a mix of ornamentals and edibles in my front yard, I’m too much of a landscape artist to fully commit to just utilitarian gardening like I showed in this blog post on growing your own food. Plus, I want to sell this house one day (probably in about 5 years) so I have to be cognizant of resale value.

Right now, in addition to the sweet potatoes, apple trees, pawpaw tree, and herbs I am growing in my front yard, I’ve got a ginormous 15′x15′ mound of butternut squash. My wife calls it “The Blob” and we always see people walking by scoping it out. A few years ago squirrels told me where to plant my squash and so I did so this year. Butternut squash are versatile in the kitchen, and fairly easy to grow. A little supplemental watering if there is a drought, and that is it. They can be affected by powdering mildew, so a fungicide can be helpful, but they are one of few squash varieties resistant to squash vine borer.

I’m letting the blob grow all it wants, I’ll just mow around it (not that I’ve had to mow, we’ve had a drought lately, hence the wilty leaves). I’ll probably get 60 pounds of squash off of these plants, all for the price of a pack of seeds. It might not be the most attractive thing in the world, but a squash vine is not a permanent landscape feature, it can be removed at any time. So to grow it or another vine (such as watermellon) in your front yard all you need is a small planting hole/mound (with improved soil please), and then let it spill over onto the grass, and mow around it. Unlike a crop like say corn, you don’t have to commit a large portion of your yard to permanent garden if you don’t want to. You could also grow pumpkins this way as a project for the kids.

For most squash you don’t even need to start them until June (or even later if you have a longer growing season than we do in Michigan), and they take a little while to get going, so it isn’t as if it’ll cover your yard for the entire summer either.

I’ve talked significantly in the past about growing your own food, growing healthy foods, and whatnot, and I’m not going to merely be rehashing that here, you can look in the related posts in the bottom.

Instead I want to talk more specifically about nutrition and cooking, but in a way that is only applicable to gardeners, for a reason which will become evident.

My personal relationship with food has morphed into mostly considering it as fuel. There probably isn’t a person out there who would even consider putting substandard or contaminated or the wrong sort of gasoline in their car. Afterall, they don’t want their engine to break down and car repairs can be costly.

And yet people don’t seem to give the same care to their own body, and if you think mechanics bills are high you should see doctor’s bills. The fact is our bodies are engines, and if you don’t put in the right fuel your body will break down, and that affects your quality of life.

I don’t like salmon, I will never crave salmon, I would prefer almost any protein to salmon, even other fish (except for tuna, tuna is gross). But I try to eat salmon every week, because it is very healthy for you (wild caught as much as possible though, even if frozen. Frozen wild caught > fresh(thawed) farmed). Likewise, for the past quite a few years (5 maybe) I’ve had the exact same thing for lunch almost every day. Normally people might want variety, but I see my lunch merely as fuel for my body and I treat it as such. So I have a protein smoothy with bananas and either raspberries or blueberries depending on seasonality and what I have in the house.

I don’t mean to get all preachy, but I just think that if more people thought of food as fuel, rather than a daily source of pleasure and indulgence, we wouldn’t have all the obesity problems we have as a society.

But I digress. Today I am making shredded chicken enchiladas. I cook some onions and chicken with some salsa, stock, and other seasonings for a long time until it gets all shredded then I add some reduced fat cheese, assembled the enchiladas, and bake.

However I added some ingredients you may not typically think of for enchiladas. Swiss Chard, Beet Greens, and Purslane.

These three foods are superfoods. Swiss chard and beet greens are closely related (looking identical from the ground up) and extremely healthy. They are probably the healthiest leafy green you can eat, and they stand up well to cooking. They are also very easy to grow. If allowed to go to seed they will reseed here in Michigan. I don’t even have to plant swiss chard anymore, it just grows in my chard bed because I always end up letting a few go to seed at the end of the season. With swiss chard and beet greens you can eat both the leaves and the stalks, though I only added the leaves today, and with beets you of course get the superfood roots that have incredible nutrition benefits, beets are perhaps the single best food preventer of colon cancer. Both the roots and leaves are high in fiber as well, and tons of other nutritients.

Purslane is so easy to grow it is like a weed, in fact, it is a weed. Though I grow a cultivated variety of it that is more upright than the weed version. You can eat any version though. In addition to being high in nutrition, and like chard being able to stand up to the heat in cooking, it is the highest known plant source of Omega 3 fatty acids, including EPA type Omega 3s, which is the good kind also found in fish. Purslane also reseeds readily, plant it once and never plant it again. Of course, as a weed too, it tolerates drought, and can grow almost anywhere, needs little fertilizer, etc.

Now, here is where it gets interesting. It doesn’t always make sense to buy these plants at the store (nevermind that you can’t really buy purslane most places in the US), a whole bunch of swiss chard might be hard to eat if you’re only using it as an additive, but if you garden, you have the opportunity to grow these very very very easily to grow plants (both can go in containers too, especially purslane), and only harvest what you need when you need it.

So, during summer, I add one or both of these plants to almost everything I make. I can add them to soups, stews, stirfry, pasta sauce, casseroles, anything mixture like such as my enchilada filling tonight, and of course salads, basically anything I cook that is not grilled or a dessert. They add nutrition to meals for free, without changing taste (for those picky eaters) and most probably won’t even notice they’re in there unless you tell them. So you’re sneaking nutrition on your family. There is hardly any excuse not to do this really.

Spinach is another option for this manuever, but it isn’t quite as easy to grow (it has more pest problems, neither purslane nor chard/beets seem to be bothered by any leaf pests, at least around here), and also isn’t going to reseed for you. It also typically doesn’t get harvested all season like the other two can be. With chard/beet greens and purslane you can pick off leaves as you need them for a longer period of time and the plant will keep producing, spinach won’t do that for as long and bolts quicker.

If you can dedicate just a few square feet of your garden to these two plants you’ll have a perpetual source of sneaky goodness you can add for added nutrition to all your summer cooking. I highly recommend it.

Sweet Potato Slips in a Jar

Wee Little Slips Planted in a Mound

Sweet Potato Slips in Containers

If you’ve never grown sweet potatoes, you probably can, most areas of the US and even southern Canada have a long enough and warm enough growing season. There are also certain varieties that require a shorter hot growing season.

Being in Michigan I ordered one of those varieties, Georgia Jet.

Sweet potatoes are generally sold as slips. You can make your own slips, you basically stick a sweet potato in a vase of water suspended with the aid of some toothpicks. Do this 8 weeks or so before your frost safe date, they take awhile to develop, then when you’re ready you cut them off and plant them.

Or you can order slips, which I did this year (the ones I made for myself in the picture was purely for the benefit of this blog post, the lengths I go to for my readers). When the slips arrive they typically look dead, but that is normal, just put them in cool water if you can’t plant them right away (But strive to plant them right away) and try not to plant them in the glaring sun of the afternoon, but towards sunset. Water well at planting and the next few days and they should perk back up. They are very hardy plants.

Sweet potatoes, like all root crops, prefer a loose light soil so they can grow big roots. In the bed which I planted them I turned the soil significantly with my pitch fork, and I used raised beds so it has no foot compaction, then I mounded up 10 inch high mounds of potting mix (which is as loose and as light of soil as you can find – if not cheap), and planted the potatoes in the mix. This thus creates the loosest lightest possible soil I can think of. Hopefully they do well. And of course next year, I can just reuse the same potting mix, so, it’ll be cheaper. Raised beds are also good because the soil tends to be warmer, and they need warm soil.

Sweet potatoes can also be grown in containers, if you have some big enough. I use those big black plastic containers trees come in from the nursery. If you’re big into gardening and landscaping you probably have a few hanging around. You can recycle them or throw them away but I never do because they’re so useful. For instance when digging a planting hole in an established bed they can be used to hold the soil so it doesn’t get scattered on your mulch, but that is another post. They just so happen to be very good as vegetable containers (regular potatoes too).

In an interesting bit of serendipity, not only are these containers big enough to grow sweet potatoes, but usually made of black plastic, which of course attracts the sun, gets hot, and heats up the soil, just what sweet potatoes like.

When planting sweet potatoes plants should be in hills 12-18 inches apart, with 4 feet between rows. When translating that spacing to our big containers, it basically means you plant 1 slip per container.

Sweet potatoes can be harvested any time throughout the growing season, but the longer you wait the bigger they will be. Towards the end hold on on watering lest they crack like a cabbage after a rain. Once harvested they must cure and dry a little in a fairly hot dry place, then you can store them in a cool dry place. If stored correctly they can keep months, which means your Fall harvest can last until Spring, at which point you can make your own slips from one, thus providing you with perpetual sweet potatoes.

That is all well and good, but as with any “green” thing you sometimes have to wonder if they’re just doing it for the money. Marketing their food as local as a way to sell more of it.

Because, you see, I think that if someone were really advocating for local food they’d recommend the most local food of all, your garden.

Something Trendy This Way Comes

Front Yard Farming

Gardening is becoming more and more popular lately, especially edible gardening. I think it is a perfect storm of the green movement and the recession that has made people think that they will grow their own food to save money.

Just in my little neighborhood I’ve noticed two people put in front yard vegetable gardens. Yes, they are sacrificing their lawn and curb appeal for a fenced in utilitarian vegetable garden, and that is just front yards, I’m sure many more did as much in their backyards where I can’t see.

In a way a front yard farm, as I like to call it, is a beautiful thing in it’s own way, because it is an advertisement for something simple and easily to do, and that if everyone did it, I’m convinced the world would be a better place.

So, Why Grow your Own Food

There are four reasons to grow your own food.

1. It tastes better, seriously. Bananas ripen off the tree and get better with age, but many many foods start losing flavor and sweetness as soon as they’re picked, and also benefit from being allowed to fully ripen on the tree or plant (at which point they’d be too ripe to ship, so you wouldn’t find them in stores).

2. It is better for you. Just as plant flavors change, the nutritional profile does too, almost without fail produce that is fresher has more vitamins and minerals than stuff even a few days old.

3. You save money. You don’t always save money right away, because of the startup cost of starting a garden, but in the long term you certainly do, and with some times like an apple tree the savings can be enormous.

4. You get more variety. At the store your options are limited, even at the most well stocked grocery store. But the variety of available seeds for your planting at home is far larger.

So… how to get started

I’ve written a bunch of articles that should hopefully get you started in growing your own food.

Fall is for Planting Fruit
Grow Potatoes in a Trash Can
Garden for Dollars, Grow Asparagus
How to Build a Raised Bed Vegetable Garden out of Wood
How to Build a Hoop House for Frost Protection
Growing Raspberries
Edible Ornamentals
In addition to all of those, I have compiled guides to growing over 100 different specific food crops, you can find that full list here.

That should get you started, and if you want any help in planning your foray into edible gardening you can post in the forums attached to this site, or comment here. And remember, you don’t need a lot of room to grow some of your own food. You can plant a dwarf apple tree that’ll produce a couple bushels a year in a space as small as 4×4.

A year ago I planted an apricot tree I had ordered from Stark Bros. I ended up making a post about it to rave about the quality of the bareroot tree I was sent, it had almost perfect branching.

I mentioned in the post that with such nicely pruned branching the tree could fruit sooner than normal, perhaps as soon as two years.

Well, it is covered with blossoms right now, and typically blossoms mean fruit. Sometimes when a fruit tree is young it will fruit only on a few small areas of branches, and that doesn’t necessarily mean fruit, but for every other fruit tree I’ve grown, being fully blossomed like this means fruit later this year.

Also odd is that some of the blossoms are coming directly from the trunk and or primary branches, making me think this may be a spur-type plant, (that fruits from primary or secondary branches, instead of tertiary ones) but it was not sold as such.

This is, however, the first apricot I’ve ever grown so maybe it is a normal thing for the tree. Anyone have an opinion on that?

In anycase, the tree is still certainly performing mightily.

At Lowes the other day I saw something and made an impulse purchase, but I’m glad I did, because I really could use this product.

Basically it is a metal and plastic frame about 6 feet high with shelves on the inside and a thick clear plastic sleeve ont he outside that zips open. It cost me only $40.

I don’t have a single window in my house that faces south. I also have cats, and babies, and so I don’t have a lot of space for indoor seed starting, with window light or artificial light (and personally, artificial light never seems to produce good plants for me).

This box however has all the room I need to start seeds, more than enough really. The thick plastic really holds in heat, when I unzipped it after I had it in the sun it felt like opening a sauna door. I’m not sure how much freeze protection it’ll give, but it will at least give some protection, and I can always bring in the plants overnight if needed. Because it is mobile too I can always wheel it around to optimize sun protection and shelter. There are microclimates in my yard and putting it in one of my warmest microclimates should help compound the protection the plastic provides.

Only one problem, wind. After I set it up and planted my seeds a few hours later I go out and it was on it’s side. I knew this would be a problem, so I had set it up for a week without any plants to see if it’d tip, it didn’t, great. But after adding seeds I did move it to get more sun and that probably opened it up to more wind.

The solution is to relegate the bottom shelf to holding some concrete pavers. Now it is weighed down enough where I’m confider the wind will not hurt it.

All told, I’m pleased with the purchase, it is just what I needed. I can use it now for seed starting, and later for propagation when I need to control humidity, and it was only $40.

However, extending your harvest is something that is interesting and useful for all people who grow edible plants, which is a whole lot of gardeners, so I’ve decided this is on topic enough for me to post about.

I love making jam, I can make really cool flavors that you cannot buy in a store. I can give the really cool flavors away and feel that they’re special gifts because they’re unique and I made them myself. I also like the concept of self sufficiency and so I can, if I choose, not give a dime to smuckers and still have all the toast and PB&J’s I want, all year round.

Plus, one can only eat so much fruit when it is in season. You give it away then, or it goes bad. And sometimes fruit that isn’t good enough to eat out of hand, can still be canned. Such as odd looking pears & apples.

How to Can

Call this your 2 minute primer. It is actually really easy to do. You’ll need mason jars & lids, which you can buy at the grocery store. You’ll need pectin (which is what helps it set), which you can also buy at the grocery store. The pectin will come with instructions as well. And you need a couple big pots and a small canning toolkit. I like this set here because the ladle holds the perfect amount to fill a typical jar up to the appropriate level while still leaving head room.

Anyways, back to your primer. First, you must sterilize everything. Put a clean towel out on your counter and boil some water, put all the tools in the water, all the metal lid rings too, but not the actual lids. With the lids while the water is coming up to boiling, but still just barely simmering, dip them in briefly, then remove and put on the towel, no touching with your hands. Give it a few minutes at a roiling boil, remove everything and set on the counter (wash your hands too, you did do that right?). Now put the jars in the water, and leave them there (keeps them warm).

In another big pot make your jam or jelly or whatever as per your recipe, then using the ladle and funnel ladle into a hot jar you just removed from the boiling water, leaving one quarter inch of space left at the top. Using the magnet tool put a lid on the jar, then secure a metal ring on, but do not tighten it, think secure, not tight. Do this for all your jars, then put the jars back into the boiling water with at least 1 inch of water above them, you may need to boil them in two batches, and boil for 10 minutes (at sea level, you mountain people will have to go longer).

After the required time remove the jars and place them on cooling racks, they’re now done. You should hear clicks and pops as the vacuum seals start working. After a few minutes of cooling test each lid by pressing down on the center of it, if you can move the little lid popper thing, it isn’t sealed and you can try again, or just put that jar in the fridge and eat it first.

The other jars should be good for a year to forever, use a sharpie to write a date on the lid, and store them in the pantry, but always err on the side of caution. If you pull a jar out of the pantry and the seal is broken (the popper pops when pressed) discard it. All jars should be hard to open the first time, if they’re easy, it didn’t work. If you open a jar up and it smells wrong, discard it. If it is off color, discard it. If mold is growing, discard it. Better be safe than sorry, you can always make more jam.

Now, my three favorite recipes. If you make any of these, come back and post a comment letting us know how it worked out.

Banana Rasberry Rum Jam

This stuff tastes so good I don’t know why it isn’t sold in stores. There is just a hint of banana flavor in the jam and it makes a mean PB&J, probably because, apparently, bananas go well with peanut butter (see Elvis). It is also good on toast and I’ve used it to glaze salmon. The alcohol in the rum boils off during cooking, it is just used for flavor.

3.5 pounds raspberries fresh or frozen (since raspberries go bad so quickly I usually freeze the ones I harvest from my garden that I don’t eat that same day, and then when I have enough frozen, make a jam)
3 very very ripe bananas
1 cup of dark rum
1 cup of cranberry juice
1 package of “Ball’s No Sugar Needed” pectin
3 cups of sugar (we’ll use some anyways, but normally we’d need 6 with regular pectin)
1/4 cup honey
pinch of salt

Add it all to a big pot and cook until it is liquid and boiling, stirring frequently, very frequently. Skim off any foam on top (it is perfectly edible, just air bubbles). Then run it through a food mill in batches to remove the seeds. Put it back in your pot, back up to boiling, and then ladle into the jars and process as mentioned above.

Makes about 9 jars. All jars in this article are half-pint size.

Caramel Pear Butter

I love my pear tree, but because I don’t spray it or otherwise baby it during the year I get a lot of messed up fruit, maybe it fell off, maybe an insect ate some of it. Maybe it is just underripe. Whatever the problem, pear butter is the solution. Cut off the bad parts, keep the good parts, and make pear butter out of them. You could also do this with apples, all the rejects from your tree. You can use this on toast etc, but also, try glazing some pork with it.

1/4 cup apple juice (cold pressed natural please, this replaces the pectin)
6 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
7 pounds ripe pear flesh, peeled, seeded, cored
3 cups packed light brown sugar
1 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg (really, buy whole nutmeg and grate it fresh, tastes so much better and keeps far far longer, trust me)
3/4 teaspoon coarse kosher salt (other salt is okay, I guess)

Add the fruit, apple juice, and lemon juice in the pot and cook, stirring often, until the mixture is liquid and boiling. You may want to add the lemon juice first or as you go to help prevent the pears from browning. Boil for about 15 minutes, cover, and then simmer another 20 minutes. Blend with an immersion stick blender (or blend it in a real blender in batches, immersion blenders are so much easier, and good for soups too). Now add the sugar, nutmeg, and salt, boil until the sugar dissolves, simmer uncovered until reduced to 8 cups, stirring frequently.

Then ladle it into the jars as above and process as above. Note, no pectin is added, but apple juice has some in it, still, if you want it less sauce like and more jam like, add a little bit OR add some unripe apple flesh to the pot at the beginning (also high in pectin).

Makes about 15 jars.

Strawberry Kiwi Christmas Jam

I make this jam with the little fuzzless hardy kiwi I grow in my garden. I call it Christmas jam because you can make it two-tone red and green if you make each fruit separately and then pour in layers. You can also easily mix the two together. So if you want to do it separately, divide everything in half (half of the sugar to each pot etc) or just mix it all. You can use regular store bought brown kiwi if you don’t grow or can’t find the smaller green hardy kiwi, but peel them.

1.5 pounds hardy kiwi, stems removed.
1.5 pounds strawberries, cleaned and green bits cut off.
4 cups of sugar
1 packet of “Ball’s No Sugar Needed Pectin”
3 tablespoons lemon juice.

Cook fruit and juice together until liquid and boiling, mash with potato masher, cook a few minutes more, add sugar and pectin, stir frequently until everything has combined. Check taste with spoon, smile, it is good.

Prepare your jars for canning as above, ladle and process as above. Makes about 10 jars.

So the relatively bland and white potato has little going for it. But did you know in the Andes, where potatoes are from, they grow in all sorts of colors? One of which is purple, containing the same antioxidants as blueberries. And, they taste just like normal potatoes.

Locally I can only find them in mixed bags of gemstone potatoes at the store. Last year I planted one and it grew and I got a decent little harvest off of it. This year I ordered seed potatoes from Burpee, potato variety called “All Blue” I can’t say I recommend it. It definitely seemed different than the unknown variety I planted last year.

Firstly, many of the potatoes had a mostly white interior. I picked the best one of the picture you see here, but many had large sections of white around the outside. The spud also seemed more susceptible to scab, and yields weren’t too good. The color also faded significantly when cooked, making mashed potatoes with these ended up brownish white. This never happened with the ones I get from the store. I’ve decided this is an inferior variety.

There is another purple variety, “Purple Majesty” that I’ve seen available as seed potatoes. I think I’ll try that one next year. Considering the added nutrition benefits and no change in taste, I can see no reason why these shouldn’t take a bigger share of the domestic potato crop, hopefully it grows in popularity in the future. Nothing quite like eating your fries, and getting your antioxidants too.