Field and Philosophy 10 June 2008

 

Rainy greetings to all of you!  We are so happy to keep yummy veggies coming your way in the face of frankly uncooperative weather.  This is the ‘greens’ part of the summer CSA season, so you’ll get lots of lettuce mix, spinach, and radishes.  They’re fresh and so good for you, but the trick is to vary the dressings and to try combinations.   Some good dressings

 

Extra virgin olive oil & red wine vinegar

Diluted soy sauce, tahini, and lemon juice

Balsamic vinegar, then add raisins

 

Toasted nuts are awfully good, if you’ve got the time, such as almonds, walnuts, sesame seeds.

 

Field Report

 

The thundering rain of the weekend, combined with the previous round of storms, has really pounded the newly tilled soil.  This time of year is the time of the ‘farmer’s trinity,’ when we plant, we cultivate, we harvest, and do lots of each!  We have planted most of the long season summer crops in the last 10 days:  tomatoes, sweet potatoes, summer and winter squashes, cucumbers.  I hope to finish the melons and peppers and eggplant before the next round of rain Thursday.  Fortunately, I have some early planted melons and cucumbers.  They haven’t done much, I admit, but if the weather continues to warm, we’ll have watermelons perhaps before August! 

 

Things already in the field look good.  We’ve gotten lots of help, and so the fields are clean of weeds well into the second month of ‘weed season’:  May, June, July.  Even the onions are clean!  We’ve had excellent pea germination, so I’m hoping for a strong harvests of peas. We finally saw a pea flower today!  Strawberries had a lot of blossoms, and I see lots of flowers on the raspberries, so I hope to see a good harvest of strawberries and raspberries.  The cooler and cloudier weather has slowed them down, however.  The peas and strawberries will be late. 

 

We see broccoli heads forming, and the cauliflower plants are wrapping well.  We should have lettuce mix and spinach for most of the rest of June, and head lettuce should appear in a week or so, as should scallions. 

 

Ask questions!  You’ll see us seed some fields to buckwheat with the warm weather here at last.  We’ve added more fields so we can fallow more; we don’t need to get any bigger!  Our neighbor Richard has brought a bee hive – we are very excited about it – so expect more squashes!  Come and see everything grow!

 

UPDATE.  The wild weather this Thursday has washed out about 10% of our recent planings of peppers and eggplant.  We’ve never had anything like this happen before.  The water came from a culvert under highway 23.  We are a fortunate farm, and our damage here should not affect our crops, but it did make a rather dramatic hour as we grabbed transplants floating in the torrent of rainwater.  We will replant them in another field early next week.  We lost about 3” of topsoil on about 10% of the field.  We are lucky; so many others have been hurt so much more.

 

UPDATE #2.  As of Friday morning, there appears to be quite a bit of damage done to our lettuce mix and spinach.  Spinach dislikes wet soil, and the leaves become thin.  They are easily torn and then rotted by repeated wind and rain.  The heavy rain has also bruised the leaves on our mixed greens.  The mixed greens I think will recover in time, but our second succession of spinach is probably a complete loss.

 

But, lest all news be bad, I found red strawberries this Friday afternoon, and also garlic curls or scapes! 

 

Weather Report

 

I haven’t added the rain gauge numbers yet, but I think we got about 5” this past weekend.  Many other places got much more, destructively so.  The constant cool and also cloudy weather slows the growth of most vegetable crops.  Certain weeds, notably quackgrass, acquire a longer growing season.   What happened to spring?  Well, a La Nina formed off the Pacific coast of South America this winter, and it kept April and May cool.  Ridges of warm air formed over the Pacific coast of North America and over Greenland, causing ‘blocking highs’ which kept the jet stream curving way south over the Rocky Mountains.  With the jet stream to our south, steering winds stay to the northwest, and so we get our weather from the interior of Canada. 

 

With June,  I see a different set-up.  The  jet stream seems right over us, giving us a parade of storm systems.  So we have rain and clouds, or wind.   What we haven’t had yet is any amount of settled warm weather.

 

Vegetable History:  Spinach

 

Spinach is one of the best vegetables around.  It packs considerable nutrition; eaten raw, it contains a great deal of vitamin C.  Raw or cooked, it contains quite a bit of vitamin A, calcium, potassium, vitamin B, and some iron.  To get the iron, though, you must eat it raw.  When cooked, oxalic acid binds up the iron. 

 

Spinach originated in Persia several thousand years ago.  The Moors brought it to Spain, while the Turks brought it to Greece.    It appeared in the first English cookbook, sometime in the 14th century, where it was called ‘spynoches.’

 

My favorite way to eat spinach, especially large leaf spinach, is raw.  I take each leaf and dip in it a sauce.  My favorite sauce for spinach is a mixture of soy sauce, aromatic sesame oil, and some hot pepper.  Hummus also works well.  

 

 

Radishes

 

You got a lot of radishes in your boxes this week, so you have a right to know some radish history, no doubt about it.  Unfortunately, little is known about the origins of the radish.  They were eaten in Hellenistic times, and wilder cousins exist in Europe and Western Asia.  They are part of the brassica family.

 

Radishes have a good amount of vitamin C,  and fair amounts of vitamin A and several B vitamins.  They are a fair source of minerals. 

 

Usually we chop them into salads, and enjoy the peppery flavor.  But, for a twist, try crushing some fresh ginger into soy sauce, then putting some radishes into the gingery soy sauce to marinade.  You can dip radishes into hummus as well.