Spring into summer

Hi folks - if you're a CSA member, we hope you've been enjoying your share so far! It's been fun doing the first few harvests, and even more so because the crops are faring very well this Spring. We've been especially excited about the kale, which may be surprising to some - last year all of our kale plants died due to the soggy conditions, so we're glad to be picking hefty bunches this season. The Red Russian variety that we're harvesting right now is definitely my favourite, I love the succulent texture.

The Spring rush to get crops in the ground seems to be slowing down. I manage the seedling greenhouse and it has been emptied of lush green hot crops over the last few weeks as they've been transplanted into one of our four 'caterpillar' tunnels. The photo to the left is in our pepper tunnel, today we finished planting out all the sweet, shishito, and hot peppers in here. These tunnels are great because they can be moved with relative ease. Each of the arches you see is sitting on a piece of rebar that is driven about 2-3 feet into the ground, whereas greenhouses rely on more permanent anchors. These peppers will be staked and tied so that the weight of the fruit doesn't pull the plant to the ground. Fingers crossed for a bumper pepper crop this year, last season's early spring heat killed most of the early pepper flowers so our yields were much lower than expected.

Emptying the peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants out of the seedling greenhouse has made space for more successions of other crops. We plant multiple generations of many of the vegetables we grow, and right now we are sowing seeds for late summer and fall harvests. In the photo on the right you'll see the trays that Rebecca and I seeded today - fennel, cabbage, swiss chard, basil, and radicchio to name a few (I had to get Romy in the shot for good measure, she likes hanging out in the greenhouse with me). Some crops are only seeded ones (like the aforementioned hot crops, and winter squash, for example) but we seed multiple, small generations of many others so that we have a constant supply of diverse veggies to harvest. For example, we sow lettuce seeds every 2 weeks to ensure we have a steady flow of greens.

I'd like to get back into sharing recipes related to the season veggies you receive in your share, so here's one that I made last night that our household really enjoyed. This is a NY Times classic - Braised white beans with greens and parmesan, excellent mopped up with crusty toasted sourdough and great for a rainy evening. I used a full bunch of chard and half a bunch of kale when I made it, and the recipe advises to discard the stems but I say keep them in, they cook up beautifully. You should be able to download the recipe pdf below.

Braised White Beans and Greens With Parmesan Recipe.pdf

Download PDF • 957KB

Thanks for reading!