Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Salad turnips — If you’ve never tried these delicious white turnips before, you’re in for a treat! Throw out all your preconceptions about anything named a “turnip” and meet these anew. They are not for cooking with but instead for eating raw (hence the name “salad” turnip) — simply slice and put on a salad or eat with a dip all on their own. They are sweet and refreshing. (The greens can also be cooked and eaten in the manner of mustard greens. Sauté with leeks and serve topped with a fried egg for breakfast!)
- Broccoli
- Bok choy
- Cooking greens — Your choice between various bunched cooking greens: chard, collards, kale or mustard greens. Try pairing your cooking greens with the greens from your turnips for a bigger batch of diverse green flavors!
- Rapini
- Salad mix
- Head lettuce
- Leeks
A few weeks back, when we were in the midst of yet another gloomy, rainy period, I expressed my concern that the leaves were never going to return to the trees again. At least, that’s how it felt in that moment, when winter just kept going and going.
Of course, I was wrong, and the leaves have returned to most of the trees (with the rest in progress) — as they always do. This year’s weather might not feel the way we expect in spring, but the seasons do keep on turning. Even when it is obscured by clouds, the sun does keep shining.
With the return of the leaves, I’ve been thinking about trees. Casey and I share an affinity for trees, perhaps because we both grew up in the verdant Pacific Northwest. There have been many trees that we’ve loved over the years — both in terms of types and specific individual trees we’ve known.
Casey and I both would characterize Big Leaf Maples as happy, friendly trees and remember fondly the row of “BLMs” that bordered the driveway of the farm where we worked in Bellingham. The trees loomed well over our heads, and their large leaves provided wonderful deep shade in the summer. It was hard for us to believe that they had been planted by the farmer and his wife, because they were so tall and full by the time we were working beneath them.
We also both remember the mature trees that lined the streets we used to walk everyday in the actual town of Bellingham, where we lived for seven years. We remember the large chestnuts that would drop leaves and nuts on the sidewalks in the fall. We would crunch through the leaves and pick up and rub the nuts’ smooth shells with our fingers before rolling them along ahead of us.
We remember the tall, full ornamental cherries that lined one section of our daily walks, blooming profusely in light pink every spring. And, we both remember the year that a dozer pushed them over in full bloom to prepare for developing the adjacent lot into condos. After a moment of silence, we broke off some of the branches of flowers lying on the ground and took them home with us to enjoy their sweet scent one last time.
We remember the stand of alders and maples across the street from our apartment that grew so close together that we would hear them crashing into each other during wind storms.
When we moved here to Oregon in 2006, we met new trees. Our first March here, we marveled at the full open silhouette of single oak trees in the midst of fields (and even chose that image for our farm’s logo). When we visited the land we would eventually buy and turn into our farm home, we of course fell in love with the enormous Black Walnut on the edge of what would become our house site.
When we went to design our house, in fact, we measured the open space between the walnut tree and a Comice pear tree and used that distance as our starting dimension. Those two trees continue to grace our house, hugging it from each side. Today, the pear is in bloom, and we can see the blossoms from our kitchen window.
Each year, we love watching the process of buds opening to blooms and hosting buzzing bees. And then we love watching the pollinated fruit grow and grow over the summer to mature in the early fall.
Out the windows to the south, we can see more distant trees: our neighbor’s blooming cherries (white like snow!) and a dense orchard of cottonwoods beyond that, just now turning solid green.
And, the Ash trees in the slough are leafing out too, along with the trees we consider “surprises.” Among the dense growth of Ashes and dogwoods along the east side of our farm, there is one spectacular Linden (whose green blooms send their scent all over the field in May) and a surprisingly delicious seedling cherry. This spring, I noticed that the cherry tree has many more small seedlings growing up beside it — perhaps they too will have good small cherries on them!
Yes, there are many trees we have loved and do love. But it is a new experience for us to know and love trees that we ourselves have planted.
Today, Rusty and I walked around the farm checking in on the many young trees that Casey and I have planted since moving to the farm in 2007. Even though Casey pruned the trees in both our orchards hard this year, their growth is evident in the solid width of their trunk and the profusion of blooms!
I also checked out a line of native trees that we planted out very small back in 2007. We weren’t sure at the time about the final layout of the farm, but we knew that we wanted to start planting trees! So we bought a few inexpensive very young native trees and planted them close to our northern property boundary, where we knew they would never risk shading any of our crops when they grew big. Then, we sort of forgot about them.
We needn’t worry about shade issues yet, because it took them three years just to even start getting established. But this year, they’re finally looking like something that could become big. There are a few Douglas Firs, which are now knee high and covered in new buds. The Big Leaf Maples (our favorite friendly tree!) have survived, in spite of us thinking that they died several times. They are still whips, but the bases are getting thick, and I think this spring they will grow into something more tree-like.
It is exciting to see these trees grow and marks a significant shift in our sense of time and place. Casey and I are both in our 30s now (I entered my third decade in March), and we’ve been living here in Yamhill County for five years with four of those here on this specific farm, in this house.
This is the most settled we’ve been since leaving home, and we are of course ever so much more observant about certain patterns in nature and time than we were as children. It isn’t so much that we didn’t notice things back then (we both have many fond and clear memories of fine details in nature), but as children our time scale was so different. The time from one spring to the next felt like an eternity, and observing the patterns of growth on a tree would have been lost in our focus on the instantaneous moment.
Now, we’re old enough and settled enough to be enjoying these patterns finally. It is an experience we were hungry for even when we were younger and moving around more — this sensation of our roots growing deeper into the soil alongside the roots of trees that we have planted, tended, and watched grow. Someday, in time, even the trees our hands have planted will be tall and providing shade, just like the maples we loved in Bellingham.
Suffice to say, the time from one spring to the next no longer feels like an eternity. Although we are aware of how much work each season encompasses, we know it too will end and bring us into the next. And we know that we will always eventually arrive back at the start, at the promise of spring. Just as the leaves return each spring, so we are here still too. We may not lose our leaves over the winter, but by staying in place, we feel these patterns become a part of our very being. In spring, we can’t help but feel that some part of us also returns refreshed and ready for the growth ahead of us.
Instead of college terms or 60 days-to-maturity lettuce heads, we are now marking the seasons of our life by the growth of trees. And, playing beside (and someday under) those trees is our other new marker of time: the quick growing weed of our son Rusty. Oh, what a gift it is to be still enough to truly know the place where we live and have time to enjoy the people who inhabit it!
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
