In Your Share (May 21st edition)

The rains have returned and our cool season crops and the irrigation crew are relieved! This is great growing weather for greens, pea shoots, and spring root crops. It also means we can take a break from setting up and moving irrigation to focus on other tasks at the farm. This week we’ll be transplanting celery, celeriac, lettuce, fennel and more broccoli. It’s also time to replant chard & parsley which we seed directly into the ground. We have historically used an Earthway seeder for direct seeded crops, but this winter we purchased a new Jang seeder which we have been very happy with.

You can download Recipe Packet for this week’s share HERE. These are written by my friend Katherine Deumling at Cook With What You Have. Congratulations to Katherine on her election as chair of the Board of Directors at Slow Food USA!!

We still have a few SUMMER SHARES for sale!! Follow the links above to sign up.

This week your share may include…

  • Chard: The chard is more tender than many greens and doesn’t always make it through the winter, but this year happily it did! Try it in the Farçous (Swiss Chard Pancakes) from your recipe packet or make my grandmothers Chard Bisque.
  • Garlic Scapes or Whistles: These are the tender tangled flower stalks from Early Chinese Pink garlic. True to it’s name, this is our earliest variety – it flowers first and the bulbs mature early too. Scapes are easy to use and tasty raw or sauteed. This variety is on the spicy side when raw so it’ll add a nice kick to a salad. The flavor mellows when you cook them.
  • Green Garlic: In the fall when we plant our regular garlic field, we always save a few cloves just for green garlic. These are planted on a much closer spacing – just a few inches apart – and harvested early in the spring. The bulb end is most tender and can be used raw or sauteed. The tops are flavorful too they just take a few minutes longer to cook.
  • Lettuce: Little baby lettuce heads this week will make a tender tasty salad.
  • Parsley: This time of year parsley, a biennial, starts to flower so you may see some of the buds in your bunches. Whatever you make with it, think about saving a bit of the bunch for Katherine’s  Homemade Veggie Bouillion stock.
  • Pea Shoots: The tender shoots of the pea plants have a similar sweet flavor to pea pods. Toss them in a salad or try them in Katherine’s shortcut risotto.
  • Popcorn: We love this Early Pink variety! If you have a microwave you can put the whole cob in a brown paper bag and microwave it 1 min at a time for up to 3min. Most of the kernals will be popped off at that point so pour it in a bowl with some butter and salt & yum! BE CAREFUL – more than 4 consecutive minutes in the microwave  can cause the cobs to catch on fire!! Otherwise, take the kernals off the cob and make perfect popcorn the old fashioned way. 1 cob makes about 2 cups when it is popped.
  • Turnips: Not your grandmothers turnip – these are pure white, crunchy, mild japanese salad turnips. The variety is Hakuri and the greens are tasty too!

Coming soon… cherry tomato plants next week for sure!