Tag: beet greens

Beet greens!

30 Jun 200917 Jun 2009 by Mike (tfb)

If you love beet greens, you can practically taste this photo! Fresh-picked, sauteed just to wilting in olive oil and butter, with a smashed and chopped clove or two of garlic, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Heaped on a plate. Topped with a couple of poached farm eggs. It’s hard to imagine anything easier to cook and more perfect to eat.

The greens from the first planting of beets—Kestrel (above) and candy-striped Chioggia—are just sizing up. They can be harvested at any size, from quite tiny for eating raw in salads, to huge, for cooking. I’ve never grown beets just for the greens, they come from thinning the plants, which usually happens when the leaves are 4-6″ (10-15cm).

On Friday, we’ll thin the beets for Saturday’s market. For the beet greens with poached egg, our new 20-week-old hens arrive on Monday, ready to lay. Life makes sense. :)

Farmers’ market cruises along…

15 Aug 20082 Aug 2008 by Mike (tfb)

It’s 11 am and most of our harvest is sold. This is good, because the quantities of what we’ve been bringing have been fine. Still, with no early tomatoes, late green beans, not much summer squash, a wiped out first planting of cucumbers, and hail-killed first round of much of the peppers and eggplant, the pickings feel a little slim. It’s funny how variety seems to work at the market (and probably in the CSA shares as well): the greater the selection, the happier people seem to be, even though they don’t really buy more, or still buy mostly the same things. Maybe it’s because, as consumers (here in North America, at least), we’re so accustomed to being wooed by apparent choice, a regular parade of the “new” and the “improved” and cleverly repackaged, that having the same staple crops for a couple of weeks in a row makes the stand seem a bit stale. It’ll be…amusing to see outlooks change if (when) fresh food starts to get scarce. Well, all in all, a good day at the farmers’ market!

Still a lot of greens…

15 Dec 20084 Jul 2008 by Mike (tfb)

The Friday harvest is still greens-heavy, with beet greens in several varieties leading the way. Here, as the afternoon winds down and the temperature cools, Michelle and Lynn thin the second beets planting of Scarlet Supreme, with Chioggia and Bull’s Blood off to the right. There’s also the fourth planting of all-lettuce mesclun, just cut on the far left, and in the center, Panther romaine, miraculously spared by the earwigs and in excellent shape and taste, to be cut next… Elsewhere, cauliflower, parsley, the last of the spring spinach and peas,…

Rainy day market

11 Jul 200828 Jun 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Rain, rain, go away… Not something you’d actually hear me say, or even think, lightly. This morning’s market didn’t quite qualify, although it rained heavily and steadily for the first three hours. Rain at the market has never been too bad for our stand, people always come out. Today, the stand set-up was still in fully compact mode, across two sawhorses instead of four, but there was a fair bit of veg, including the first 60lbs (27kg) of snap peas (Sugar Ann), around 40 broccoli, and a (relatively!) vast supply of all-lettuce mesclun, spinach (Spargo), garlic scapes (Music) and beet greens from assorted varieties. Enough to just make the minimum return from market needed at this time of year to keep this tiny farm ticking. By the end of the morning, all of the CSA pick-ups had picked up, and most of the veggies were sold out. Which is…good!

Tiny harvest!

13 Dec 200823 Jun 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Spent the early morning harvesting a few CSA shares for a Monday drop-off. This is the first week of shares, and they’re still small, mainly greens… There are many tiny farming routines, things you’d probably never do in a bigger operation, that I find extremely relaxing and fun: the final rinsing and putting together of a handful of shares is one of them (it’s not really economical to separately harvest and drop off less than 10 shares or so, this is an…exception). There’s something deeply satisfying about this final post-harvest step, with the veggies together at their finest, the memory of the different quick individual harvests—picking, cutting, pulling—still fresh, that’s…cool! The spinach (above) was quickly dunked in cold well water to rinse off dirt splashed up from recent rain, then allowed to drip dry for a bit on the screen table.

Picked two types of beet greens, Golden Detroit and Scarlet Supreme. The stems are a little long on these—it all depends on the density of the rows, the weather, the harvest timing, leaf size is the luck of the draw since these are really thinnings, they’re not being grown just for the greens. Still young and tender, the baby beets and all can be cooked up, or the leaves used raw in salad (or as a salad!). Really tasty…

And mesclun, of course. This all-lettuce salad mix is a staple crop this year as usual, always on my mind! This cut’s nice and clean! Unrinsed—I let the morning dew dry off a bit on the screen table… More simple pleasures for the simple of mind! ;)

The Friday harvest

2 Dec 200927 Jul 2007 by Mike (tfb)

If it’s Friday… This week’s big harvest was the smoothest yet, with everything in, sorted, rinsed, bundled, bagged and COUNTED by around 8:30 pm. The crew this week: Sherry, Andrea, Molana, Lynn, Cezary, Conall and me. I’m over being slightly unnerved by the number of people—my reflex is still to wonder, “If I had to, could I do it all myself?”, but now it’s also…no worries, it’ll get done! Here, Andrea, Sherry and Cezary harvest beet greens, thinning at the same time. (And that’s last plantings of more beets to the left, carrots up top under burlap, and summer squash under row cover off to the upper right. Demolished pigweed strews the path.) In today’s harvest: beets, beet greens, eggplant, mesclun, arugula, carrots, green onions, potatoes, 60-80 units of each.

Beet greens at market

2 Oct 200716 Jun 2007 by Mike (tfb)

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.