One quality that makes the numbers so present is their bigness: On a yearly, monthly, and even daily scale they can be daunting.  To be on track, we need 615 calories each day from the yard — a threshold that has consistently proven difficult to reach.

In fact, we never have.

Yesterday we got as near as ever, consuming 606 calories from the yard.  On top of that, we shared 106 additional calories with our good friends Paul and Amy, who have a fine garden of their own.

What we ate is a good lesson in how hard the daily number is to hit: seven eggs and 2.5 pounds of tomatoes.  Two of the eggs went to pancakes for breakfast, and the other five to excellent egg salad sandwiches for lunch.  We made a raw tomato pasta for dinner, using four kinds of tomato (Yellow Pear, Ace, Roma, and Cherokee Purple) and basil from the yard.  All good, but we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, eat so many eggs every day, nor could we stomach so many tomatoes no matter how varied the flavors.

What worked in getting close to our daily goal was a little bit from the yard in each meal.  What we need to work on is creative ways to use what’s available at the time, in some cases tucking an edible we’re tired of into a larger dish so it’s not so present.

We would also benefit from an additional, reliable source of calories, something like the eggs — but not.  I’ve been considering keeping bees for honey and as pollinators, but will likely wait until our daughter is a bit older before massing stinging insects around the house.  A pair of avocado trees that fruit in alternate seasons might work, supplemented by something high-calorie that keeps well, like a nut.  Another option would be devoting more space to grains or successive plantings of potatoes.

Likely, a combination will best suit our palates and needs, while garnering us more 600-plus days like yesterday.

Today we celebrate having grown, harvested, and eaten 1.009 percent of our annual calories from our suburban, less-than-a-fifth-of-an-acre yard.

To get to one percent (15,000 calories), we grew 33 varieties of 21 different foods.  Among those edibles, we ate 72 Husky cherry tomatoes and 14 heads of Little Gem Romain lettuce; 85 Snow Pea pods and 39 cups of raw Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard (netting just 272 calories — it’s worth more cooked, we’ve found); and four kinds of tomato, three kinds of carrot, and three kinds of potato.  We tried 12 varieties of vegetable we’d never tasted before.

We made jam.

Nearly a third of our overall calories, about 4,000, accumulated in the first half of June, a month in which we consumed bags of potatoes — with more still at the ready.  This month we’ve also eaten carrots (Purple Haze and Pink Dragon), green beans (Contender and Kentucky Wonder), Early Crookneck squash, a few strawberries and Anne berries, Mulberries, and Roma tomatoes.

And it all came without the baggage that trails industrial agriculture, the questions of where from and how dirty and at what cost.  Our property’s better for our sowing and growing, and with any luck our dent in the world’s ecology got a bit shallower.

Perhaps shallower still in these remaining weeks.

Last week I dug up ready potatoes that had been thriving in a small plot below our bougainvillea.  In the past two weeks the tops had turned yellow like straw and wilted to the ground.  I gave them one last watering, as recommended in various readings I’d read, and a few days later carefully scratched back the surface of the earth to reveal good-sized Purple Viking and Yukon Gold potatoes.  The sets of early March had in 80 days become about 15 pounds of good eats.

And eat them we have.  We pan-fried them in the mornings with butter, onions, and pepper.  We cooked and blended them with leeks for a fine soup.  We dribbled them with olive oil, dashed them with fresh rosemary (from the yard), and baked them.  We boiled them and diced them for crumbled-blue-cheese-prosciutto-dill potato salad, and tossed them in with a roast to soak and simmer all day.

We ate them baked plain because the fresh spuds are so flavorful they need nothing added.

At least as many potatoes still sit in the yard, ready for harvest.

This haul improves greatly on the six small potatoes we pulled last season (see “Small Potatoes” posted on August 20, 2009).  Poor soil and inadequate sunlight were the culprits then — problems that I remedied this spring by working plenty of mulch and compost into a fairly sunny plot before planting.  The 80 or so days they took to mature is about 20 short of expected, but done is done.  A new round of Yukon starters are in the ground for early fall eating, as well as a few rows of a russet-type potato we’ve never tried before called a Carola.

If this good return keeps up, we’ll have potatoes till Christmas.

The potato-surplus coincides fortuitously with our need to keep my wife off dairy till we can calm our mildly colicky baby girl.  We have plenty of potatoes to go with the meat in the mostly meat and potatoes diet that we’ll be sticking to for a few weeks.

It’s nice to find we have just what the doctor ordered right out the back door.

I had nothing to do with the most brilliantly green, healthy, sturdy potatoes growing in my yard.  These half dozen tall shoots found their own way, and have been managed expertly by a decomposing pile of food and yard waste.  I feel slighted, but thankful.

By comparison, the potato plants for which I chose locations, amended the soil, and then set into the earth at precise depths with their eyes pointed skyward are a mere 10-inches tall to the pile’s 17.  In some cases mine display leaves with yellow and pale-green striations (iron deficiency, likely) or burgundy freckles (some disease or fungus) or that are tough and leathery (probably a nutrient deficiency), and at least one has the droopy, sallow look of death.

The compost potatoes, on the other hand, arose from scraps tossed carelessly into the pile, were on occasion disturbed by turning, and received irregular watering.  And during most of their growth they were situated in little to no soil and instead sat beneath several inches of leaves and clippings — which I have discovered is an accepted method of growing potatoes called “no dig.”

A friend of ours, Amy, has the same compost-sprouting happening in her bin, and asked whether it would be safe to eat potatoes grown in such a way.  It’s a fair question.  Until that pile turns to beautiful earth, it’s really like growing food in trash.  However, if you treat the resulting potatoes with the same scrutiny you give any vegetable, whether it’s from your garden or the market, such potatoes should be perfectly edible.  Since mine weren’t uniformly covered by soil, mulch, or straw, I’ll need to check each potato for green areas that occur when the developing spud receives direct sunlight.  This exposure can produce a toxin in the potato that can make the eater sick.

Otherwise, compost potatoes should be as good as any.  Or better than some.

Last week I harvested my first lot of ready compost from the pile with the potatoes, leaving the section with the tubers intact.  For the past six months I have been more than skeptical of the process, but despite my failure to turn the mound — or give it any attention, really — it produced a load of perfect, black soil, which I distributed in several new vegetable plots in our yard and as a topper here and there for established plants.

In emptying the pile, I found that it was also trying to grow beets and broccoli.  If this year’s warm-season crop fails to produce, next year I’m turning control of everything over to the compost pile.  Something tells me it might be capable of raising 15 percent of its calories in our yard.

To my surprise I found six small but perfectly edible potatoes.  Just sitting there in the dirt.  Potatoes.  This vegetable becomes so many dishes that are good it was surreal to find that my lot had produced some of them.

Potatoes.

So, I brought them inside, scrubbed them into brilliant shades of purple, sliced them thin, revealing clean, cream-colored, starchy goodness — then proceeded to make the most horrendously over-salted, over-peppered, over-milked and floured scalloped potatoes.  We spooned courageously, blindly, through several mouthfuls of the glop before giving up the potatoes as lost to Betty Crocker.

But underneath the burning, stultifying saltiness I could tell the little Vikings were good.  Damn good.