- Collard Greens - a wonderful, toothsome green famous in Southern cuisine. Great steamed or sauteed (no need to cook for hours, like a lot of traditional recipes call for - a light steam is all it takes!)
- Purple Kohlrabi - peel, cut into sticks and enjoy with your favorite dip!
- Bunch Carrots
- Head Lettuce
- Strawberries
- Cilantro
On Rotation:
- Arugula
- Mizuna
- Radishes
- Hakurei Turnips
- Broccoli
- Broccolini
A few new signature spring crops are making their way into the Harvest Basket this week: kohlrabi, bunch carrots, and broccoli/broccolini! Our field of spring Brassicas (kale, cabbage, kohlrabi, broccoli, etc) has loved this cool, wet spring - hence the collard greens the size of elephant ears! We were thrilled to get our first harvest of true heading broccoli this week, which marks the beginning of our summer broccoli season. Broccoli is one of the crops that we grow successionally, meaning we plant a new bed every week for the first couple months of spring to ensure a steady supply for the first half of summer. We grow many other crops successionally, namely head lettuce (which we plant every week from late March until October), cilantro, carrots, beets, sweet corn and fennel. This is in contrast to storage crops that we plant all at once for a single mass harvest, like onions, winter squash and potatoes.
Unlike the Brassica field, the strawberry patch did not love the two inches of rain that fell over the weekend. We would have had a record-breaking harvest of huge berries yesterday were it not for all the rotten fruit that ended up in the compost. We did our very best to toss out any "seconds" while we picked and sorted flats yesterday, but the warm, wet weekend caused a lot of insidious rot. If you encounter a hidden rot spot under the green cap, please forgive! The strawberry sorting was arduous yesterday and some might have snuck past us. We're looking forward to more sun and happier strawberries!
With less rain in the forecast, we plan to open our Strawberry U-Pick next Wednesday, June 22nd! The u-pick will open at 11:30 am and will be open until 2:30, or until the patch is picked out, whichever happens first. Our experience in years' past is that the patch gets picked out quickly during the first part of our season (some days in under an hour, depending on the crowd). That means if you are traveling a distance to get to us, you want to arrive when we open. Our apologies that we can't guarantee a specific range of open hours. The crowds mellow out by August, if you're looking for a more leisurely experience and want to pick a large quantity of berries. All of the details about the u-pick are here.
Enjoy the new rainbow of colors in your Harvest Basket this week!
