Yesterday’s beet greens harvest is today’s fresh produce at market—well under 24 hours from field to stand! The fine dining action is really up top with the leaves—great raw or lightly sauteed at this size—but the tiny, unusually bright red Cioggia beets at the bottom got all the attention, with every third passerby asking about these strange looking “radishes”. Beet greens aren’t a staple veggie around here, still, enough people know ’em and love ’em to make these 500g bunches move briskly. A little slow, people-wise (it picks up in July), it was nonetheless an all around enjoyable, successful day at the farmers’ market, with beautiful weather to boot.
Harvest
Beet greens harvest
Andrea and Conall harvest Cioggia beet greens in the hot mid-afternoon sun. In tiny farming, it seems that every action has several different effects and offsets, some good, some not so, and a balance, hopefully leaning to the positive side, is struck each time. Here, harvesting greens in the heat is not the greatest for the freshly pulled leaves or the plants that remain, but this is the time we had (a cloudy afternoon with a mild, refreshing breeze every harvest day would be nice!). A quick bath in cold well water instantly refreshes the harvest, and the plants will recover overnight. This particular bed of beets had gotten quite weedy, so weeding while harvesting slowed things down. But, the fairly dense piles of pulled weeds, spread between rows, dries into a decent mulch that’ll help retain moisture and prevent more weeds from germinating. And, the harvest is also a thinning session, giving the remaining plants the space to fill out into proper beets. It all works out…!!
Not so sorted at the Market
A bit disorganized at the farmers’ market today, with beet greens and radishes in piles instead of bunches. (The cosmetically challenged flea beetle-bitten bok choi, although tasty and well-received, didn’t help.) The harvest is bigger this year than in the past, and yesterday, even with Conall, and Erin for a few hours, it got a little ahead of us. An afternoon thunderstorm break didn’t help, and the mud splashed up from the rain made for extra rinsing. Because there is no cooler here, everything is straight to market and the Fridays can get crazy, till well after dark (I have to think this no-cooler thing through again—the advantage is, the veggies are absolutely fresh). In any case, we were up at 5:30, rinsing spinach and radishes, and bagging mesclun and spinach at the market at 7:00. I did most of the morning alone, bunching on demand, which is about the slowest way to go. It also probably hurts sales a bit, when everything isn’t neatly prepacked, and there’s little time to keep the veggie presentation neat. In any case, this is still runthrough time. There’s one more weekend to go before the CSA shares start and 25 or so shareholders will be picking up at the market—by then, Friday harvest will really have to be sorted out!
Team harvest!
Today was the first team harvest of the season and for this tiny farm… I’ve certainly had harvest and packing help in the past, but this time, it’s with a regular crew who will hopefully be around for the season. The BIG difference is the size of the harvest, which is at least double what I’ve done before. This was more of a runthrough, with Jo and Erin harvesting spinach, giving it a water bath to cool off, spinning it in the Maytag, and packing a few 400g bags to try out…bagging. Conall and I finished up through the evening. In the harvest this week: radishes (French Breakfast, Rebel), mesclun, bok choi, lettuce, spinach (Bloomsdale, Spargo), green onions. Not bad for the beginning of June.
Found onions
There still wasn’t much to take to the farmers’ market today, mesclun and radishes both weren’t ready, so it was baby spinach, the last harvest of early lettuce, and this surprise crop, volunteer green onions sprouted from a few dozen of last year’s cooking onions that had been overlooked in the field. I made a last minute decision to harvest them at 6:30 am, just as we were about to leave. I pulled them up—no time to dig—and filled a bushel bin in just a few minutes. At the market, I explained how they were grown and that they’re stronger tasting than regular bunching onions grown from seed. They were snapped up in no time. One of the great things about taking fresh veggies that you’ve grown yourself to market is that you’re not forced to conform to standardized tastes and sizes and appearances. So long as quality and freshness are consistent, unusual offerings provide a cool extra bit of variety and freedom all around!
Evening harvest
In the greenhouse, harvesting in the first and last couple of hours of the day is the only way to ensure tasty salad greens. Daytime harvest is near futile, as the leaves go limp and require serious rehydration. In the chilly evening weather, plants perk up, and it’s all right as rain! Here, cutting greens in the evening before market means clearing the arugula that bolted during the week and rapidly buried the lettuce. Out of arugula chaos comes delicious, garden-fresh salad mix! (On the tomato front, yesterday’s field transplants did well, only a few leaf burns where they touched the cover, this despite quite a hard frost. That’s good.)
Rabbit food
Around here, there is a definite segment of the population for whom salad greens, while accepted as possibly “good” for you, are not really considered proper human food. I might even think it’s an old school, meat-and-potatoes farmer thing, though I haven’t chatted with enough farmers to…generalize. In any case, I’m an all-new first generation farmer and to me, salads are great! This is the first dinner salad harvested this year, picked from the early lettuce aisles. It’s a mix of arugula and four lettuces: Simpson Elite, Granada, Red Salad Bowl, and Sierra, each with its own color, texture and flavor. Lots of fresh veggie variety is an excellent concept. :) Tastes good, too!