Spring is for Salads

Not a bad start to our 2022 growing season! Spring is for salads- spring spinach, lettuce varieties, and cool season brassica greens. Summer seems to be for side dishes- summer tomatoes, sweet corn, beans, zucchini. We’re watching our cool season crops mature in our spring garden while our summer garden blocks fill up quick with these future appetizers.

This week, we’re offering more cool season salad bases and ingredients. You’ll have lots of lettuce to work with- mixes for salads, crispy heads for sandwiches and wraps. With greens freshly harvested the morning of pick up or delivery, absurdly long-keeping as a result, you’ll have a diversity of varieties, textures, and colors with which to build salads and entrees all week long, overlapping with our first June harvest.

Our first Wednesday delivery went much longer than expected last week due to, we hope, general inexperience with the route, navigation mistakes, and a slow harvest. Hopefully we’ve worked out the kinks and can be much more efficient today. We’ve decided to reverse our course so that if you received a box late in the day last week, you can expect a delivery earlier in the afternoon this round. Leave out your materials from the last delivery if you can and we will fill/replace them. Thanks to our home delivery shareholders for their patience as we work out these logistics.

Week 2’s harvest features the following plant products:

Broadleaf Kale & Collards

Brassica leaves for the skillet. We’ll continue to harvest collards as they are available and healthy. This week, curly green kale plant varieties are in need of trimming. Big, broad, nutritious leaves ought to cook down nicely in the skillet with lots of oil and salt.

Mustards

Our bed of mustard greens is over-mature, but worth harvesting this week as time and labor permit. The flavors are more intense- spicy like radish and nutty like arugula. They’re stemmy and stringy- more so than we prefer, but hard to deny as substantial. They’ll be less suitable for raw salads but consider tenderizing them in the skillet or including them in a smoothie.

Easter Egg Radishes

There have still been plenty of nice radish roots to pull. We’ll continue to share as our 50 ft row produces. Radishes mature quickly and will be succeeded by their slowing growing cousins- Turnips. Other root vegetables to come include beets, kohlrabi, carrots, and potatoes.

Spinach

We’ll keep harvesting 3 different varieties from our 50 foot row until it bolts.

Salanova Green Sweet Crisp Lettuce

Considered to be one of the best lettuce cultivars in existence, Sweet Crisp Salanova can be thought of as a frilly romaine/iceberg hybrid. The leaves pull apart easily and chop decisively. It’s a versatile lettuce great for all applications.

Red Butter Lettuce

This is another butterhead variety, “Skyphos,” similar to the “Adriana” green butter we delivered last week. It grows impressive, rusty leaves heading to green. Expect more savory flavor, hinting at intentional bitterness.

Spring Mix

This is a standard spring mix of lettuces often found packaged in big bags at the salad section of a standard grocery store. Grown organically, in nutrient-rich native soil. Oakleafs, Romaines, and red leaf lettuces.

Broccoli Sprouts

Broccoli is a tough crop to justify as a farmer with limited space. Many commercial growers refuse to grow it as it is undeniably unprofitable. The plant takes up about as much row space and nearly as much time in the field as a tomato, but standard crown broccoli has maybe 1% of the output. For farmers focused on yield, broccoli is a tough sell.

One way we try to work around the issue is to grow bunching broccoli varieties that give us a longer harvest window and more output per plant. We will begin distributing these bunches this week- broccoli bouquets great for roasting to a oily crisp. We may not have enough for everyone right away, but the harvest window is long and we will do our best to account for who is owed bunches as they mature. If you don’t receive a bunch this week, expect it soon. It’s a slow start, but a theoretically extended harvest.

Parsley

We have flat leaf and curly parsley varieties well established in our spring block. They taste like what carrots smell like. These herbs will accompany vegetable harvests for the next couple weeks, ideal for freshening up egg salads.

Wildflower Bouquet

It’s hard to call a beautiful spring flower a “weed” even if it’s deep in a pasture competing with our sheep food. Erin has put a lot of effort and attention into selecting for and arranging these wildflower bouquets, making good artistic use of the volunteer ornamentals we forage for in our woods and meadows. We’ve included our winter rye cover crop which has matured to its “milky stage,” presenting a gorgeous flower.

Eggs

Our flock has been producing well this spring and all shareholders will receive a full dozen colorful eggs grown on pasture.

Two out of Three of our garden blocks are planted! We’ve established rows of tomatoes of many varieties, peppers sweet and spicy, beans, sweet corn, eggplant, zucchini, basil, kohlrabi, onions, bok choy, cabbage, potatoes, garlic, beets, carrots, thyme, rosemary, leeks, oregano, squashes, and flowers (definitely forgetting something).

We hope folks have found, and continue to discover, useful and creative ways to incorporate our produce into their weekly meal planning. Don’t hesitate to share any notable dishes, preparations, or preservations either with us directly or on social media. Thanks again for supporting this ambitious, idealistic project and making it feel right and good.

Have a great week!

Erin & David