June 5th, 2024
What’s in your share?
Salad Mix
Bok Choy
Radishes
Kale
Arugula
Broccolini (if you didn’t get it this week, you’ll get it next week)
Fanny and Levon admiring the newly trellised tomatoes. Photo: Ali
STORAGE TIP!
Put all your greens into a sealed container or a plastic bag immediately! Greens wilt and get dried out, losing their integrity when they sit in the fridge naked and cold (how would you feel?) 3 Ways to Preserve Kale
Salad Mix - Lettuce loves cool weather, and it can be difficult to grow in the summer months. We’ve received overwhelming feedback that our salad mix is something folks want weekly, so we will have it as often as possible. We don’t grow “baby greens”- we find harvesting, weeding, and cleaning that style of salad mix is tedious and makes us cranky. Instead, we pick out actual head lettuce varieties and plant them at closer spacing; harvesting above the growth point so that the individual leaves are cut as opposed to the whole head. This also allows each plant to grow back, so we usually cut each bed twice. You may notice that the color of the leaves changes as the weather becomes warmer. Hot, dry weather often makes the colors less prominent, while cool weather increases their sugar content and makes the colors more vibrant. We eat our salad mix for almost every meal, so we are constantly paying attention to quality and make note of the seasonal changes.
Look at these beauties!
Bok Choy - is a Chinese vegetable that is one of the first crops to mature in spring. Different from the other early, more leafy greens, bok choy has a hearty stem, or rib, that makes it ideal for sautéing, grilling, roasting, steaming, and boiling. We also love eating it raw, using it in slaws or salads. If you want to eat the stems whole (it makes for an impressive presentation) the trick is to soften them enough that you can easily cut them with a knife or a fork. I like to use a combination of steaming and frying with high heat to get softened stems, with a crispy crust and leaves.
Radishes - Love em or hate em, they are always the first root crop of the spring. Radishes are a great crunchy addition to a spring salad, but are also delicious roasted. Halved or quartered, tossed in oil and soy sauce, roasted radishes may change your mind about their taste.
Kale - It’s green season, clearly! Greens love spring and fall, and because we have so much other stuff in the summer, we don’t really try to fight the weather and keep the greens growing during the summer. They’ll make an appearance in fall again, but enjoy them while they’re here. My absolute favorite way to eat kale is what I eat literally every day for lunch: de-stemmed kale, sautéed quickly with olive oil (tops two minutes, high heat in a wok), next to an egg on toast and a little ferment or dressing or whatever is seasonal and lends itself to some additional flavor.
Greg and John slaying some weeds in the onions. The crops love the rain and so do the weeds! Photo: Judy
Arugula - has been tough for us to plan for the first CSA for the past couple years. It matures 30 days from being seeded, and because the leaves are so tender and susceptible to flea beetle damage, it needs to be covered at all times, which increases growth speed. Usually it goes to seed, or “bolts” before the first harvest, making it unmarketable. But this time, we held off on planting, and while the leaves are pretty big anyways, they have not gone to seed and are the perfect supplement to a salad. The leaves are mature, not “baby” arugula. Because of their size and how we wash and bag our cut greens, putting them into bags would have bent and bruised the stems and leaves, creating a soggy mess in a plastic bag, which nobody wants. So we opted to harvest them into cute little bunches. They have been dunked in water for an initial cleaning, but a little rinse never hurts. When you are ready to eat them, simply use a kitchen knife to cut the stems from the leaves just above the twist tie, and you’ll have some awesome arugula to add to your salad mix.
Broccolini - SURPRISE! The broccoli always manages to surprise us right before the first harvest. It’s just starting to flower, so if you didn’t get it this week, you’ll get it next week!
Recipes to try
Korean Style Pink Radish Pickles
Bok Choy Stir-Fry (and lots of other tips!)
It’s my (Sara) night to cook on Tuesdays, so this is what I made last night. Some spring meal inspiration: Rice noodles, chard stems, and early onions in a coconut, ginger, turmeric, and lime sauce, sautéed bok choy (I separated each stem from the heart, cooking them on high heat with a lid at first (to steam and soften the stem) then removing the lid for some char), simple salad with salad mix and radish with a sesame ginger dressing, and some hard boiled eggs pickled in beet vinegar from our chickens who just started laying, and some chimichurri pulled from the freezer from last season.