Farm Fresh Rhode Island blog

Travel to Quebec in late May and you may be surprised by the abundance of local tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, apples and potatoes. All of them are crops you’d expect to see first start coming into season in the middle of the summer. But in May and June?

Actually it’s not just Quebec that has seemingly fast-forwarded the season. More and more Rhode Island farmers have early tomatoes and cucumbers available this year. As the market for local foods matures in RI, so too is our local food systems’ production capacity. RI eaters are hungry for local tomatoes when farmers’ markets and farmstands open in May and June. So RI farmers are figuring out how to grow ‘em earlier and earlier. But how do they do it?

• Tomatoes. These tomatoes are started in hot houses to be ready for late spring. The cherry tomatoes are particularly delicious. The slicing tomatoes, which are mostly beefsteaks, are missing a bit of flavor but they’re still tastier than any mealy tomato that comes off the truck from California. These early season tomatoes do require some extra technique and greenhouses, and so there’s usually a price premium to cover the farmers’ costs. Right now, we’ve seen tomatoes from Moosup, Schartner and Wishing Stone farms.
• Cucumbers and zucchini. Certain varieties, like English cucumbers, are happy to start early in a greenhouse. Their texture and flavor are wonderful, just like the summer, but as in tomatoes they require more effort to get going so early than the field cucumbers that come in July and so cost a bit more. Schartner and Wishing Stone are growing early cukes, but we haven’t seen any early zucchini in RI.
• Apples. Since the apple harvest is until the fall, those in the markets right now have been resting in controlled-atmosphere storage since last season’s harvest. The CA storage maintains a consistent level of oxygen, carbon dioxide and cool temperature so that the apples stay crisp. Some varieties are better at storing than others, and growers optimally stagger when they take the varieties out of storage. In addition, the earlier an apple is harvested and put in CA, the crisper it will be when it’s taken out. So some apples are picked for CA before they are fully ripe, especially if they are intended for this final stretch before the new harvest. The trade-off for these apples is that the flavor and sugars never had the chance to fully develop. So while they are crisp, they’re less interesting to taste. And vice versa, flavorful apples this time of year often lack the crispness of a new apple. The only local apples we’ve seen are Ida Reds from Hill Orchards, which had unexpected crispness, given how fully flavored they are.
• Potatoes. Though a classic storage crop, there is still no comparison to a fresh dug potato. The RI Royal potato growers sold out in December and most of their potatoes were enjoyed while they still possessed the wonderful youthful flavors. From December and January on the starches begin to break down. These potatoes are good but do taste and cook differently. Come spring, seed potatoes can be exposed to light early in the season and they’ll sprout and produce new potatoes earlier in the season and provide greater yields. It’s impractical to start hundreds of acres of potatoes this way, but it is practical enough to provide delicious potatoes in early June. Moosup and Schartner have new potatoes.

You’ll find these early season crops at these growers’ markets and farmstands, and chefs can buy them on Market Mobile.