Happy rapini season!

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Kale rapini — The edible leaves, stems, and shoots from our over-wintered kale plants! Find more info in the newsletter.
• Turnip rapini — The edible leaves, stems, and shoots from our over-wintered turnip plants!
• Mustard OR arugula rapini — The edible leaves, stems, and shoots from our over-wintered mustard and arugula plants! (Warning: the arugula rapini packs some delicious heat, so consider adding it to dishes rather than eating straight! It is awesome in pasta dishes or on pizza.)
• Cabbage — Yes, cabbage again. It’s the tail end of winter, so rejoice and enjoy while they last! We couldn’t skip this week though, because it’s St. Patrick’s Day on Thursday and many of you actually requested cabbage! Time for some colcannon, or cabbage and noodles, or cabbage and corned beef.
• German butterball potatoes — To go alongside your cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day, of course!
• Sunchokes — Thanks to some inspiration from our CSA members, we have been enjoying some extra special cole slaw at our house by adding very thinly sliced raw sunchokes to the mix. So good!
• Leeks
  
• Red/yellow onions — This is really truly the last of the onions. We’re planting the rest (which are sprouting) for seed!

The big news of the week: we’re harvesting ‘rapini’ finally!

So, what is ‘rapini’? As you may have guessed from the veggie list this week, ‘rapini’ is a culinary term for the edible leaves, stems, and (primarily) shoots of over-wintered cole crops. You might be familiar with the concept from the more mainstream crop called ‘broccoli raab’ (which is the same idea but grown in one season rather than over-wintered).

Because most cole crops are ‘biennial’ — they produce their seeds in the second season of growth — they typically do not produce shoots or flowers when grown as annual vegetables. But in ‘mild’ climates, such as ours, we can keep these plants alive over the winter and witness the sprouting in the following year. Various crops begin sprouting (or ‘bolting’) for seed at different times in the season. This week’s ‘rapini’ are from the earliest bolting varieties — some won’t bolt until early summer, giving us a nice succession of different tasty greens all spring.

So, aside from being beautiful, what’s the big deal with rapini? They are delicious! As Casey likes to say, rapini is a ‘mange tout’ vegetable — that is French for something like ‘eat it all.’ In other words, every part of what we’ve harvested for you is edible and delicious: the leaves, the stem, and the shoots with flower buds. The cool weather of winter allows the greens to develop their sweetest flavor of the year. The best rapini also has big thick tender stems reminiscent of asparagus — yum! (If you don’t cook and eat your rapini soon, you might want to trim off the cut ends before preparing, since they do dry out in storage. As with any greens, you’ll want to store these in a bag — or other closed container — in the fridge until you use them.)

You can also eat rapini raw or cooked. To eat raw, try just picking out one piece from a bunch and eating it straight! We do this all the time in the fields — it’s so delicious! Or, you can chop them up and add to a salad or cole slaw.

To cook, try anything you would do to a cooking green. They are great chopped and sautéed to eat mixed with pasta or over rice. Rapini is also delicious lightly tossed with olive oil and salt, spread on a roasting pan and roasted until tender and just browning.
You have three kinds of rapini to try this week, so take time to explore and experiment. We love seeing how rapinis from different kinds of greens each have slightly different flavors and textures, but they are all good.

Also a good thing: rapini production is a sign of spring! This year’s rapini has started later than usual, a sign that the weather has indeed been as drab, wet and cool as it feels to us. But, clearly spring is still the trend. Even amidst this weekend’s crazy rainstorms, the air itself felt milder than it had in a while (especially for such a stormy day).

In spite of the warming, longer day-length trend, we are definitely feeling behind this year. By now we’ve usually had more than one opportunity to get ground worked up and possibly planted. We did get some seeds in the ground during the early February warm spell, but since then they’ve languished and aren’t looking too promising.

Fortunately, last fall our employee Jeff built us a new field hoophouse (so we now have two). Our primary goal for these structures is for growing tomatoes and peppers in the summer, but we’ve been finding them alluring as shoulder season spaces too. One of the field houses is full of lettuce right now, and last Friday, Casey and the crew planted an array of early spring crops in the new house: chard, kale, spinach, Asian greens, turnips, lettuce, arugula, and radishes!

The space in these houses is still obviously limited, so we’re hoping we can plant outside soon too (although there’s no sign of drying in the forecast yet). We understand now how some farmer friends of ours slowly end up with acres of plastic covered space on their farms! I don’t think we’ll go that far with our field house use, but it is a very comforting thing to have dry, warmer space to plant when the season is not ‘cooperating’ with our ‘plans.’

As we often observe, spring in Oregon can only be defined by its unpredictability. Our first two= seasons growing in Yamhill County brought us a beautiful early warm spring — this year, not so much. Even the daffodils were late this year!

This week is St. Patrick’s Day, so our weekly offering of cabbage and potatoes is right on (how wonderful that this saint’s feast day falls at the tail end of winter rather than the middle of summer!). And, to add to the usual mix of winter foods, we have the delightful green of rapini too! Hoorah!

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

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Reminder: Quarterly payment due soon!

For the quarterly payers, your second quarterly payment is due by April 1! Make checks out to “Oakhill Organics.” You can bring checks to pick-up or mail your payments to us: P.O. Box 1698, McMinnville, OR 97128.

Reminders:

• Large share quarterly payment = $243
• Medium share quarterly payment = $157
• Double medium quarterly payment = $304