In your share this week!:
hakurei salad turnips – These are those little white golf ball turnips with the nice upright tops. If you’ve never had them before, please do yourself a favor and eat one raw. Almost everybody I know who tries them raw is amazed how juicy and sweet they are. The leaves are similar to mustard greens (which you also got a bunch of), so are good braised, sauteed, etc. You can of course also cook these turnips, but I slice them into salads or as crunch on sandwiches. This planting had a bit of germination issues, so there are not so many, but later plantings will hopefully do better.
spring mustards – This bunch of purple tinged and green mustards are fairly young and tender and not really spicy, so you could add them to a salad. You can also use them as a cooking green of course.
napa cabbage – The big weighty thing in your share this week! This is the makings of traditional kim chi. Here’s one recipe which also uses the green onions.
pink beauty radish – I know these were crazy spicy last week due to the heat the week before that. I think this week they are a bit more tame, though I’m sure still have a bit of a kick. You can peel them to get rid of that spice. Also soaking them in a brine of half rice vinegar, half water, plus sea salt, might mellow them out a bit as well (plus preserve them in your fridge).
lettuce – “Nevada” is the variety of this head lettuce, and it’s a French crisp type. Crisp and crunchy yet still buttery in texture, with good flavor.
spinach – a bunch of “bloomsdale longstanding.” I learned today from Josh that you can eat the roots as well as the leaves of spinach. So I’m going to put the roots in with whatever I end up doing with this spinach – how about you? We thought we weren’t going to get much spinach this first time around because the weed pressure was so crazy in the spinach, but it turned out not so bad.
green onions – First onions of the year! We planted these in the very same bunches that you are getting today. As they grew their roots became entangled with their neighbors, and this held them together through the harvest and washing process. So nice to not have to make bunches out of many separate tiny onions. (Farmers are always looking for ways to economize on time!)
kale – “red ursa” is the variety, from a lovely local seed company: Adaptive Seeds (Sweet Home, OR). The kale leaves are big and beautiful right now, so enjoy.
The farm is looking lush with all this rain. Many, many, many millions of tiny weeds have also taken the opportunity to sprout. Josh took out a whole bunch of them with the help of our awesome arsenal of weed-killing devices, aka hoes. We love our hoes in all their various shapes and sizes. Maybe we’ll have to do a blog post on our favorite hoes sometime this year. We also spent some time hand weeding the garlic and carrots as well. Keeping those weeds under control while still staying on top of the planting calendar is the name of the game right now. We have our eggplants and peppers to plant out this week or next, and then the biggest spring plantings will be all wrapped up. Of course, there are a few larger summer plantings off in the distance, but we can ignore those for now…
Enjoy the various shades of green this week!
Cully Neighborhood Farm 