Meet this week’s Mac veggies:
- Chard — Cooking greens are uncommon in the American diet, so if you’re new to the CSA you’re also likely new to cooked greens. We hope you will try, try, and try again to find ways you like to eat cooked greens. Sometimes the simplest preparations are the best: chop your chard and sauté in butter or oil with minced sweet onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the greens are wilted to your taste. I recommend cooking longer at first than you might expect. We Americans have a bias toward under-cooked vegetables, but if you cook them well (a la the Italians) you may find you like it better (Casey and I love our greens super wilted over medium heat). You can eat the chopped chard stems too, but it’s useful to add them to the pan a few minutes earlier than the leaves.
- Salad mix — No need to explain this one! Toss with your favorite dressing and eat! Delicious!
- Braising mix — This is a mix of many different cooking greens: mustards, “rapini” (the flower tops of over-wintered cole crops), collard greens, chard, kale, and chicories. Prepare using the directions for chard above (or try other methods too!).
- Spinach OR baby chard — Your choice between these two tender greens.
- Purple sprouting broccoli — Little delicious ‘broccolini’ (and it’s purple too!). Eat as you would any kind of broccoli: raw on a salad, sautéed, or even roasted!
- Popcorn — The “pinch point” in the season makes us especially excited about growing dry beans and grains in the future, since they are invaluable for getting our diets through these humps without giving up on local foods! This year the only dry grain we have in stock is the last of our popcorn! Remove from cob by prying with you finger and then pop as you would any whole kernels (in a popcorn maker or on the stovetop).
- Sweet onions — Sweet and great for eating raw (but can be cooked too!).
- Green garlic OR leek tops — Your choice between these two exciting alliums. “Green” garlic is garlic that has yet to bulb up and dry down. Chop as you might a green onion (as far up as is tender) and add to cooked or fresh dishes. Green garlic is delicious paired with cooked greens or in salad dressings. The leek tops are the “bolts” of leeks and they can be prepared in the same way, except that the green is tender all the way to the top.
As I write this newsletter on Monday evening, the sun is shining warmly on our farm. After finishing the CSA harvest, this afternoon Casey and the crew planted out two beds of lettuce and four beds of celery root. All is well on the farm, and you’d hardly know that we’re nearing the end of an exceptional spring.
Yes, I know that farmers love to talk (ahem, complain) about the weather. It’s not surprising given that we physically work out in the weather and everything about our work is dictated by the weather.
We’re always claiming the extremes, calling things the “hottest” or the “coldest” or at least “recent record setting” (which of course can be made entirely relative based on one’s definition of “recent”).
But, often we’re also accurate in these claims — there are many ways for weather to be extreme, and since we started farming in 2006 we’ve witnessed more than we expected. Our first summer was the hottest summer on record, followed by the rainiest fall, followed soon after by the biggest storm, etc. Each of these events affects the farm, of course, so it’s hard for us to let them pass without comment.
This spring has also been exceptional, but less dramatically so. If anything, it has been extreme in its mildness. Spring has been a long string of cool, wet, mild days — only broken up occasionally by a warmer sunny day such as today (still only in the 60s). It’s hard to complain too hard about such exceptionally mild weather, especially given the devastating extreme weather happening in the rest of the country.
In fact, the weather has been so mild that it’s hard to even be too worried or upset. Honestly, often we just forget what time of year it is and function mentally as though we’re living one month back. The end of May feels more like the end of April, and it’s only when we really look at the calendar and then out at the fields that we start to wring our hands a bit.
Normally at this point, we’re just hitting or just past the big burst of our spring planted crops — the over-wintered crops that we rely upon for the earliest Mac pick-ups have been long gone (either harvested or “blown out” by heat waves). Instead, since we’ve had nary a heat wave or even sustained warm weather, we’re just now hitting what we think of as the “pinch point” — the moment when the over-wintered crops are finally running out but the spring planted crops just aren’t quite ready to harvest.
Typically we feel this painful moment sometime in April, but as I said everything is shifted this year. Casey and I walked the fields together this weekend to check out how things are doing. In spite of the rainiest March and April on records, we’ve kept up with our planting schedules (although we are waiting to plant our warm season crops a little longer), so there are many plants in the fields … they’re just not growing the way we would expect.
We can’t worry too much because we do still have some over-wintered crops (unprecedented for this time of year), plus our productive field hoophouses. And, we know that as soon as the sun starts shining more regularly, the plants in the fields will (hopefully!) grow with a great burst of spring energy.
We’re welcoming many new CSA members this week — new folks are starting at our Mac pick-up and lots of new folks are participating in our first Newberg CSA pick-up ever (yay!). It looks like we have enough produce to provide all of you with plentiful, diverse shares this week (which allows us a big sigh of relief), but we’ve had to be very calculated and careful in what we decide to harvest. We’re really hoping that soon we’ll be feeling some of that spring abundance that makes our job so exciting.
And, of course, there is always some exaggeration when farmers talk about the weather too. Crops are growing — the peas are above knee high; the fava beans have set fruit; the kale leaves are much bigger than babies — just not at the rapid rate we expect for this time of year. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that the season picks up the pace soon, but either way we’ve planted diversely and have no worries that we’ll be providing plentiful delicious CSA shares all summer and fall.
One thing that we’ve learned over the years (and in this spring in particular) is that most weather is good for some veggies — different crops flourish in different years for that very reason.
We may not be seeing quick growth in our fields, but we also have some beautiful spinach in the fields that looks like it’s growing slowly enough to be super tender and avoid “bolting” (when it shoots up to go to seed — usually triggered by heat). And, we’ve been taste testing the carrots in the greenhouse — they’re still too small to justify harvesting them yet, but they are the sweetest juiciest carrots we’ve ever tasted! Our son Rusty can’t get enough!
So, a big welcome to the new folks! You’re in for a wild, delicious, and fun ride this year! Let us know if you ever have any questions or concerns. And, in the meantime, enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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New to our CSA? Here are some things you can expect this season:
- Fresh diverse veggies every week
- Informative, helpful newsletter
- Fun, on-farm events (first open house is June 26!)
- Unexpected conversations with old and new friends at pick-up
- Positive changes in your eating habits
- A few challenges as you adjust & learn
- New favorite vegetables & recipes
- Increased connection to the seasons, your community, & the land
- A profoundly changed eating experience!
