The last 3 weeks have been a scorcher and we are looking forward to the relief that started today. The exhaustion that vegetable farming brings this time of year is double-edged. You have to be careful not to strain yourself in the heat, while the end of the day weariness brings a deep sleep and rejuvenation. Along with the rest, the food we get to be surrounded by helps keep us sustained.

We will be doing a lot of digging over the next month to get the potatoes out of the ground. The season has started out good with a nice harvest of Purple Vikings. We have been eating them non-stop for the last week. Last night I steamed some to use in potato salad tonight.



Potato, onion and cutting celery ready for dressing

Simply steam 2 lb of potatoes (cut into chunks) until tender, let cool overnight and then mix with 1 medium sweet onion (cut into slivers), 2 tablespoons of chopped cutting celery, and a dressing of 2 tbsp brown mustard, 2 tbsp mayo, 2 tbsp garlic oil, salt and pepper. Summertime yum.



Summer savory and basil in the field

A new addition to the herb list this week is summer savory. This wonderfully aromatic fresh herb goes especially well with cooked potatoes or tomatoes. Similar in flavor to thyme, it is also a great dried herb, so you can hang it in your kitchen until it is crumbly enough to store in an airtight jar.

I’m not sure that we have ever seen such an abrupt segue between spring and summer. With 11 days in the 90’s leading up to the first day of summer, it is already mid-summer hot.

One crop for us that we can time well with the summer solstice is the Walla Walla sweet onions. They bulb up based on hours of daylight, so they are actually one of our more predicable harvests. Tonight when I cut one up I couldn’t tell if my knife was extra sharp, or the onion was especially tender. If you like raw onions, these are prime.

We have harvested all the Chinese cabbage, getting it out of the heat and into our new cooler. We like it so many ways; cooked in a stir fry, chopped into a slaw, or fermented into kim chi. If you want to ferment the cabbage, or other items in your share, we suggest you go to our friends Tara Whitsitt’s Fermentation on Wheels page.

Potatoes are earlier than ever this year, and we hope you can taste the freshness in these early diggings. While varieties may vary this first harvest, any will go well in a hash. We suggest the substituting them in the sweet potato cabbage hash recipe from the fall of 2012.

Spring is ending early this year. The recent heat and forecast of 10 straight days in the 90’s makes this year the earliest warm up we have seen. So we are glad we could get some nice cabbage out of the field and start getting you more storage type crops.

Keep the cabbage in a produce bag (preferably vented) in your crisper until you want to enjoy its crisp, sweet taste. They add a nice crunch to a salad when cut into thin strips.

The beets are another vegetable you don’t have to get to right away (and stores the same as cabbage). With us though, the first picking usually deserves immediate gratification. And as we are lucky enough to have a stash of Wisconsin maple syrup, I thought they seemed like a good combo.

Chiogga and Detroit Dark Red beets

Beets with Butter and Maple Syrup

Ingredients:
One bunch of beets
Butter
Maple syrup
Salt
Pepper

Method:

1. Cut the greens off the bunch, rinse, chop coarsely
2. Trim any roots or scarred areas from the beet. Chop into half moons
3. Put beets in saucepan with 1/2 inch of water, sprinkle with salt 
4. Heat to boiling, turn down to simmer (covered) for 10 minutes
5. Add beet greens, stir, simmer 2 minutes (add water if needed)
6. Remove lid, add 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter, and 1/4 cup or more of maple syrup
7. Simmer uncovered for 5 minutes
8. Serve hot or cold

FRESH GARLIC F/P  The outer skins that protect the cloves are not dried back, but the cloves are especially juicy.

ROMAINE LETTUCE F/P  The last week of Spring lettuces.  It will be a while (September) before we see them again.

RED LEAF LETTUCE F  The lettuces have handled the heat very well considering their delicate nature.  Healthy soil and good weather gave us a bounty of salad this Spring.

SUGARSNAP PEAS F/P  Ditto on the peas.  They have been great while they lasted but 100 degree temperatures are not conducive to a long pea harvest.

SNOW PEAS P  We eat these raw too, by the way.  They are much sweeter than “store-bought”.

KOHLRABI F  The infamous CSA vegetable that everyone is half-fascinated by, half-intimidated with.  Peel it well, slice it and eat it raw is my recommendation.

CABBAGE F/P  The much-anticipated cabbage crop is coming in with lots of our favorite CSA-sized heads for coleslaw and kraut-making.

GAILAN OR CHARD F  Broccoli’s cousin, gai lan, is holding up in the heat so far.

FRISEE ENDIVE F  A bag of fluffy leaves for your last days of salads.

HERB CHOICE F  Mint, cutting celery or fennel.

NEXT WEEK:  Carrots, summer squash, sweet onions and basil.

FARM REPORT:
Summer doesn’t officially start for another week, but the heat is on early and the Spring crops are making a quick exit.  This will be the last week of big lettuces, greens and peas.  Expect lighter shares next week as we make the transition to summer fruits and roots.

The farm crew has been scurrying around the fields in order to save the harvest from the heat and pack the coolers full.  Most of our remaining time has been spent walking out irrigation tape for each row of the summer crops.  With the rows all taped, it is almost literally just the flip of a switch to water the fields now.  The newly-planted sweet potatoes are starting to add leaves thanks to irrigation.

The irrigation pond is full of water and we are ready for a dry summer.

Rebecca and I have been reflecting back on the state of the farm last year at this time, and current state. We decided we like this year much better. We feel good that areas which were swamped out and in such bad shape can turn around and produce the lettuce of this spring. Resiliency is one of the things that biological farming tries to build.

We have been cleaning out the fridge lately and the recipes have been written as we go. The last several nights our wok or large frying pan has been filled with vegetables and gobbled up.

As the season gets busier and busier we find a hearty meal helps refill the tank and like to mix our pasta with our veggies. One go-to meal is Mark Bittman’s spaghetti with broccoli raab and galic. We don’t grow raab any more, but there is broccoli in everyone’s share this week. If you have any garlic greens or scapes left from past shares, this is a good dish to use them in.

Sping broccoli

Another suggestion is a nice sugar snap pea salad. Go to our June 5, 2012 blog for a couple variations on a pea salad with lime-mint vinegarette.

Fogbow over the high tunnel and cro

May has been great this year. If we were a baseball player we would have a pretty good batting average. Our weakest hitter so far has been the root vegetables, but hakurei turnips and a few radishes finally step up to the plate. Looking forward to keeping them on the roster for the near future.

A favorite of ours with the hakureis is a curry from this blog exactly 5 years ago in 2011. We also recommend the curried spring vegetable stir fry from 2014.

The Asian greens haven’t seemed to stop growing. This week’s bok choi is a variety called joi choi. The bed it was planted in this April had some remnant seeds of buckwheat in it. These small grain plants are not a real weed problem, as they are easily hoed out or killed by frost. The flowers are an early source of food for flying insects and perhaps a reason we have so few pests this spring.

The herb choice this week is a mixed bunch. See if you can tell the parsley apart from the cutting celery and the dill from the herb fennel. This group of herbs are all ready for picking now and can be used to garnish just about any dish. Try the cutting celery with a stir fry, or the herb fennel with your chard.

We hope you got the email about the  strawberry patch Upick. It is open until it runs out of berries for members and their families. The kiddos who have come so far have all left red-handed. It is supposed to be a beautiful week and we need a least a few folks to keep the patch picked.

In the meantime we can spend some time getting the tomato beds weeded, staked and mulched. Make hay while the sun is shining.

Spring has felt like it has gone on awhile this year. It is only now really warming up to a point where you break a sweat. With the nighttime temps creeping up to 70, the summer plants are ready to start growing.

Meanwhile we are in the heart of one of our more luscious May’s. The word “greens” is used a lot to talk about the shares, and here in our household we have been taking advantage of the savory dishes we can make with them.




A head of lettuce

While greens on their own with only a little oil, salt and pepper can be quite satisfying, it is when you add some umami that things kick up a notch. This flavor sensation can be added with ingredients such as mushrooms, bacon, fish sauce, seafood, fermented vegetables, toasted nuts, balsamic vinegar, cheese, and more.

My goal today was to make a wilted lettuce salad out of the biggest head of red leaf lettuce that we picked today. Well it turns out that our frying pan was filled before I cleaned the whole head. It tasted great, and a couple of helpings later and the whole thing was gone. It is a great way to eat up your lettuce.

I used the wilted lettuce salad recipe from our June 11, 2013 blog with a few modifications—I used bok choi instead of hakurei turnips, and I only cooked the lettuce on high for 30 seconds and then let it wilt in the hot pan for a few minutes.

Grandpa the tractor with our Tortella spader.

Meanwhile, out in the fields we continue on with the SARE cover crop project. One of our test blocks is shown below. In the right half of the bed we rolled down/crushed the cover crop (rye/vetch) to form a mulch. On the left we mowed and spaded in the crop to incorporate it into the soil. The rye grass did not germinate well and our crop is mainly vetch this year. Lower in biomass but high in nitrogen content. 



SARE cover crop test plot

Things are growing fast out here. The alliums are plumping up, greens are peaking, and the first fruits of the season are here. We like what we see out there right now, and are enjoying the nice harvest.

For the next several weeks it will be stir-fry season. The Asian greens are quite happy with the weather and have sized up as well as they can during spring. So this time of year we like to link you to Twenty Tips for Stir-frying by Rhonda Parkinson. Another suggestion is Stir Fry Soup from our blog five years ago.

Bok choi

Tonight at dinner we made a fried rice with egg and vegetables.  Regularly having cooked rice in the fridge, a boatload of vegetables, and fresh eggs at hand makes this a go-to meal. We cook the veggies first, add several eggs to the middle of the wok to scramble, throw in some rice, stir it together. and cook until the rice crisps up a bit. A hearty meal.

On the way to making fried rice with egg and vegetables

Our recipe above is a little ahead of the harvest curve, with some hakurei turnips and gailan, but it can be made with most any of the roots and greens you have in our share. Short on fresh ginger, we even used crystallized ginger for flavor. What doesn’t get eaten tonight is perfect for lunch.

The CSA season is here, so welcome to week 1. We have been gearing up for this day since the first seeds were planted in the greenhouse back in February. It is time to start harvesting.

We do our best to give you crops are at their peak, and the lettuce could not be better. It is only so often during the year when this salad green is so tender and crisp at the same time. In last week’s blog I recommended focusing on making some good salad dressing for the next month.

If you check out our group page, you find another suggestion, lettuce wraps. Stacy Cook revived a link to our friend Heather Hands’ blog of 2009. The butterhead leaves are especially suitable as wrappers or scoops. You can make whatever filling suits your desires.

The spring herbs are in peak form too. We moved the mint out of the field beds and into our home herb garden. The area they are thriving in has been a repository for greenhouse compost the last 10 years. The mint is the happiest we have ever seen it and the sprigs are first cuttings and fragrant. The chive flowers are at their edible best, with just a little crunch. The slight anise taste of tarragon goes well with fish, chicken, in a salad dressing, or to garnish a slaw.

One item new to our share list this year is field pea shoots. These greens are actually one of our cover crops, and we feel they represent a way to make an important connection between you and our soil.

One of the premises of our farming method is “you are what you eat, so you are what your plants eat.” We feed our vegetables field peas by growing them, turning them into the soil, and letting the life in the soil digest them and release nutrients to the plant.

When we eat pea shoots the same thing happens. Bacteria in our digestive system break the pea shoots down so our body can utilize their nutritional content. It reminds us that our life is reliant on a host of other living things to perform that most important task of eating. It also reminds us that we must treat agriculture as a biological process, and not a chemical one.

The pea shoots are a sweet green for any type of salad. We chop them and use them as an ingredient in just about any type of fresh salad we make.

Things are shifting gears here on the farm. The high tunnel season is over and the field is starting to show its stuff. We are really enjoying the fresh lettuce and other goodness in the share.

And a good lettuce deserves good accompaniments. A creamy, fresh dressing is an excellent match for the butterheads in this week’s share. Their season can be short, so we eat it as much as we can right now.

Our suggestion is to stock the fridge and cupboard with staples like plain yogurt, mayo, eggs, tahini, EV olive oil, citrus, and your favorite vinegars. If you do you can use fresh seasonings from the share like green garlic, chives, dill or cilantro to keep things local in making your dressing.

Butterhead Lettuce Heart Salad with Creamy Garlic Dressing
(dressing modified from The Silver Palate Cookbook)

Ingredients1 egg yolk
½ cup red wine vinegar
1 tbsp sugar or honey
1/4 cup chopped green garlic or garlic scapes
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup best-quality olive oil

Method
1. Take outer leaves off lettuce head (save them for another salad or sandwiches) until you are left with the tender heart. You may want 2 lettuce heads per salad. Wash, dry in a salad spinner, and place in salad bowl or individual bowls.
2. Combine egg yolk, vinegar, sugar, garlic, and salt and pepper to taste in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Process briefly.
3. With the motor running, slowly dribble in the olive oil.
4. Taste, correct seasoning if necessary, and transfer to storage/serving container.
5. Top salad with the dressing and garnish of choice (we used roasted pumpkin seeds

In the near future we hope to see this recipe be able to include fresh strawberries. We have two patches this year and look forward to the chance to have a good harvest in late-May.

Finally, a little note on the late Rocky. Since he passed in late July we have been taking different opportunities to scatter his ashes on the farm. We reserved some for remembrance and found a beautiful receptacle in a carved Peruvian gourd. Thanks to my sister Cathy for the gift.