Potatoes and Cucumbers

It's very strange that the field Cucumbers and Potatoes are ready before the peas, but I'm not complaining.  I love new Manitoba potatoes.
The Manitoba potatoes that we have been eating until now have been stored from last year's harvest in September.  They have been getting gritty, wrinkly, and have been spoiling. 
Now the first of the season's potatoes are ready and they are a treat.  New potatoes have a very high water very low starch content.  That's why they taste to sweet and creamy.  Though I had people last year telling me "Dr. Oz said that you shouldn't put potatoes in the fridge", the man really wasn't talking about new fresh potatoes.  With such a low starch content, you MUST refrigerate them.  Leave them out on you counter for a day and they will turn black and wrinkle up. 
Ideally, store in a plastic bag in your fridge for up to a week.  But trust me, they won't last that long.

Size really doesn't matter when it comes to new potatoes.  As long as the skins come off of the potato easily with thumb pressure, they will have that gorgeous creamy taste.   Later on in the season our farmers separate the very small potatoes from the larger ones, selling the larger ones at a lower price.   As long as you posses a knife to cut up your potato into cookable chunks, the larger lower priced potatoes taste exactly the same as the smaller ones.  The presentation at the dinner table is just not as pretty.


Our growers have been staggering their plantings of potatoes this spring, planting new fields every week or so, meaning that we will have new potatoes in the shop until September.  If you were to plant your own potatoes on your garden, and plant them all at once, the potatoes would start to create a high amount of starches by early or mid August.   Potatoes are a tuber originally from South America.  They are collecting starch so that they can attempt to survive a winter in the ground to sprout again in the spring.  The poor potatoes don't know that they are being grown in Manitoba rather than Peru, where our -30 winters mean they don't have a snowball's chance in heck of surviving to grow the next year. :)

Cucumbers!
The very first of the salad cucumbers have started!
The same plant that produces those tiny cucumbers for pickling also produces larger sized cucumbers for fresh eating.  Growers pick only larger cucumbers until the plant is in full production and the poundage that it can produce warrants the harvesting of pickling sized cucumbers.
It's an awful job.  Cucumber plants are full of small bristles, and  the cucumbers themselves are covered in scratchy spines.  When you are eating your greek salad tonight, be grateful that you weren't the one picking those cucumbers out of the field.

Storage.
You must store your cucumbers in the fridge.  They will last for up to 5 days this way.  Out of the fridge and your salad cucumber will deteriorate within a day.
Once the pickling sized cucumbers become available, you must process the small cucumbers within 48 hours of harvest.  The thin delicate skins on pickling cucumbers mean that they stay fresh for only a very short amount of time.