Wim Hof Method
It has been great meeting and chatting with our new farm pick up folks, catching up with returning members along the route, and receiving feedback on how you’re enjoying your food this spring. We’re so grateful. Thank you again for making this project a reality.
Our Wednesday deliveries last week were significantly more efficient. Our goal is to be on the road by noon and if we finish harvesting/packing by that time, the route is very reasonable. We will deliver in the same order as last week with our Granville/Gahanna/Canal deliveries in early afternoon and our Westerville/Sunbury deliveries wrapping up the evening.
The Wim Hof Method for wilty greens:
It’s easy for leafy greens to lose their rigidity in farmers market/fresh delivery circumstances, but we’ve found it’s surprisingly easy to revive them- so don’t overreact if your veggies seem to have lost motivation and wilted. They’ve lived their whole lives with wet feet and they don’t know they’re dead.
Submerge the loose greens and heads in an ice bath for 5 minutes. The water will be the right temperature so long as the ice hasn’t melted. Drain the greens in a colander and toss them around to shake off some loose water (or use a salad spinner). Finally, lay out a bed of paper towels and lasagna your loose greens with the towels between the single layers (or roll them up).
Week 3’s harvest ought to go something like this…
Bok Choy
Some day, we will get good at growing this fantastic cabbage. In gardening, like many pursuits, “getting good” at something simply means “paying attention” or “devoting time and energy” to something. Crops are hard to grow when they require lots of attention or mental bandwidth and they’re “easy” to grow when you can ignore them without much consequence. One can imagine, with as many crops as we are maintaining, how challenging it can be to pay attention to everything all the time. So, sometimes we have to prioritize, redirect our gaze.
You can keep all the plants happy some the time, you can keep some of the plants happy all the time, but you can’t keep all the plants happy all the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
Like all brassicas, Bok Choy is bug bait. The flea beetles love it. While they’re functionally harmless and simply annoy the plant, they puncture small holes in the leaf tissue and leave the plant blemished. Whenever we encounter pests, having been unable to, or unsuccessful at, avoiding them proactively, we have decisions to make: Do we treat them aggressively or is this our “catch crop?” This spring, Bok Choy was our catch crop and we are left with Chinese cabbage that’ll be less enjoyable raw, but perfectly suitable for the stovetop.
Cut the root core at the bottom, separate the head into its individual stems attached to leafy tops, and toss them in a pan with lots of butter, salt, and pepper. Periodically covering the pan won’t hurt. The leaves will darken and melt- with any indication of prior pest damage quickly vanishing as the leaf tissue buckles and fuses in the skillet. Meanwhile, the stem is tenderizing. It’ll only take a few minutes for the cabbage to cook down and leave you with a buttery appetizer with a satisfying, creamy crunch.
Kale & Collards
Kale and Collards are cool season crops and as the sun gets higher and the top few inches of soil dries, Collard Greens especially get unhappy. Their growth slows, their defenses weaken, and they get ugly. We have about 150 plants from which we will carefully select the best leaves for your skillets, salads, and smoothies this week.
Radishes & Turnips
We’re at the end of our spring Radish harvest. As they get old, the roots get funky and the flavor gets intense. Raw radishes can be “hit or miss,” while roasted radishes never disappoint.
Our turnips haven’t filled out like we’d hoped. This was our first time really growing spring Turnips (less ideal than fall) and while it was great for the tops, the roots aren’t shaping out well. We over-seeded and under-thinned these rows. They will still be distributed as they’re available. These are purple top turnips will long, leggy greens.
Head Lettuce
We still have giant Parris Island Cos, Salanova, and Green Butter head lettuces going out this week.
Spring Mix
This will be our second and final cutting from this 50 foot row of loose leaf lettuce.
Beets!
Beets are a joy to start, to grow, to harvest, and to eat. Our bunches will include the standard “bull’s blood,” candy cane Chioggias, and sweet golden-rooted Boldors. Beets are two for one, especially this Spring’s crop. The buttery green tops are fantastic- especially those of the candy cane variety. The texture is great raw or cooked and the flavor is subtle and sweet. We are really impressed with our first pull of the season. However you enjoy the roots, be sure to use the greens too!
Broccoli
If you’ve yet to receive any broccoli, we promise we haven’t forgotten you. We have to be strategic in our distribution of crowns and sprouts as they mature inconsistently. As we harvest main heads, the plants produce side shoots that we will collect regularly and continue to distribute as long as these garden rows keep producing.
Green Onions/Scallions
We have a few onion varieties growing out in the fields. It takes a long time for an onion bulb to clock enough hours of sunlight (technically darkness) to fully develop but to satisfy our impatience, we can thin the plants in the spring and harvest scallions. The green tops are full of tangy sweetness. These plants started as seeds in February and still have quite some time before they fill out below ground.
Curly Parsley
We’ll pass out our second Parsley variety this week. These are curly, as opposed to flat-leaf, umbel herbs.
Wildflower Bouquet
Our cultivated flower varieties are taking shape in the summer garden. In the native, overgrown, fallow corners of the farm, where nature is unimpeded, we continue to find beautiful shapes and colors that shouldn’t be ignored or taken for granted. This is an opportunity for us to be creative and to forage and to explore- to do as our bodies are designed. With wildflowers in abundance, the property smells like one big rose blossom.
Eggs
We will continue to distribute eggs as our layers provide. Erin’s November classroom hatches should be laying any day now and with that we are excited to see what new colors appear in your cartons!
We are hustling to get all summer crops in before we get too late into June. As we harvest our spring garden, it’s thinning out. As it thins, we will flip the beds- replanting for late summer and fall harvests.
We’ve had shareholders volunteering on the farm and it has been so helpful! Thank you again to Dorothy and Cheryl for their help keeping our crops clean and maintained.
Happy June!
Erin & David