A sweltering day in the garden, a sunflower manages to stay looking fresh

Last Thursday was a hard day at the Farmers’ Market.  In record-breaking heat, we got up and out before dawn to harvest for the afternoon market before it got too hot to pick vegetables.   Usually we get a good chunk of preparation done the night before, but this week we had spent Wednesday night up until 11 pm unexpectedly butchering meat chickens, instead of prepping for market.  They had begun to fail to tolerate the heat wave, and we we lost three of them to it before realizing we just had to butcher them early.  (At least, they have gone to a much cooler place now, relocated to the basement freezer!)

So by the time we arrived at the market, we were already well on the way to exhaustion, overheating, and in my case, salt imbalance from chugging enormous amounts of water, sweating a lot, and eating very little.   The vegetables and herbs were difficult to keep fresh, wilting and heating up no matter the best planned attempts to keep them cool. The pavement was too hot to set the coolers on when we arrived, and one of them toppled from its stack, breaking some egg dozens.  The first potential client of the day, arriving before we’d finished setting up, became fairly disgusted upon hearing the price of a bunch of our basil.  After shaking his head and making some unpleasant comments, he moved on, but only to return shortly, brandishing a large bag of basil at me, and testily telling me that “THIS is a dollar’s worth of basil!!”  I made an unfortunate comment about anybody being able to go pick basil for themselves in 90 degree heat if they preferred, and we went our separate ways.

A bunch of our leftover basil, three days after its appearance at market. We handle it so carefully, it can stay fresh for a number of days after picking. Quality is really important to us.

Sometimes the pricing issues of being a farmer are so saddening and disheartening I wonder, “Why are we doing this to ourselves?”

But that low point was immediately balanced by a glowing new client who had just discovered us and the Westside Farmers Market on the web, and was really excited about it.  Infectiously excited and happy about it, and eager to try our produce.  It was a pleasure to talk with him about how we grow our food, ways to cook it, and so forth.  We were so happy and smiling over someone else’s pleasure and interest, and I thought “This is why we do this…”

One of the few greens I had at the market that day were lamb’s quarters.  Lamb’s quarters this past week sprang up heartily and greenly  with new young growth in some of the replanted beds, and looked too perfect not to take along to market in glorious bunches.  Weeks ago when we had fresh spring growth of lamb’s quarters for sale, a number of people in-the-know bought them, and one customer actually squealed, “Oh you have lamb’s quarters!  I’m so excited!” The next week she brought by a copy of Linda Diane Feldt’s wonderful book, Spinach and Beyond, just to make sure I knew about it.  She was so thrilled that a farmer understood, and harvested and used lamb’s quarters.

The controversial Chenopodial culprit itself, aka goosefoot and pigweed. Succulent, nutrient-dense, and ready for the soup pot.

But this week the lamb’s quarters did not get such a good reception.  Three people insinuated there was something underhanded about trying to sell weeds, and looked at me with a “gotcha” kind of look, satisfied at having identified a fraud.  One spent a good bit of time talking about how she weeded those out of her garden and wouldn’t imagine eating them, because, well, they’re weeds. Often times these are great moments to talk a little, educate people a little.  But the heat must have been getting to everyone, because on this day, people’s responses mostly left me feeling like they thought we were trying to fleece them with the lamb’s quarters somehow (heheheh…I really didn’t intend that pun).  My descriptions of using lamb’s quarters in place of spinach, and claims that the flavor is really very mild, just brought uneasy looks and sidling away from the table.

So, deflated, and feeling rebuked for trying to market something that I hadn’t intentionally planted (therefore a weed), I browsed through some other farmer’s blogs for inspiration and healing.  El at Fast Grow the Weeds came through for me as always, and I felt relief flood me as I discovered that her current post is devoted to “eating one’s weeds” in the form of purslane gazpacho, and (gasp…wait for it…)  ….lamb’s quarters with pasta.  El, I love you.

(Just for fun, here’s another lamb’s quarters recipe link, whose writer begins with with the line, “Now that I’ve discovered them, I may never go back to spinach.”)

Fresh cut flowers - a bright spot in the hot day

And just for closure… later on that market day, a beautiful smiling happy-faced woman asked if we could arrange for me to provide the flowers for her wedding in a few weeks, because she liked our cut flowers so much.  Another little high point, a little affirmation that this is the right path, that there are people out there who put wildflowers on the tables at their weddings, who eat the weeds, who see the value.

Thanks everyone, regardless of your political views on weeds and the true cost of food, for coming to see us in the 100 degree heat last Thursday!

Young radicchio starting to head

Last week’s bounty we took to the market included what were - to us - exciting additions of puntarelle, endive, and radicchio.  People bought the puntarelle, to some extent, often because it sounded unique and they were looking for something new to try.  But the beautiful heads of radicchio and frisée endive with its pretty blanched center, stayed on the table with the exception of one sale each.  So we have been eating a lot of both of them, and loving it so much that I’m not sorry they didn’t sell at market.  Except, I’m sad for how much people don’t know about greens and what they are missing in flavor, variety, and nutrition.

So I thought I’d do a series of posts about my experiences with these more unusual greens, and what delicious things to do with them.  The bitter greens I am talking about are just that - the bitter ones, from the chicory family.  These are different from the mustards - arugula, mustard greens, etc.  Mustards are all degrees of peppery, hot, and spicy, but not really bitter, while chicories are all degrees of bitter, but really not spicy.   I am not as much of a fan of the mustards as I am of the chicories.  This first post is devoted to Chicorium intybus, the radicchio.

Radicchio beside young leeks

This one isn't forming a head - just loose leaves

I have a lot of radicchio this year.  Two kinds - Palla Rossa, and Palla di Fuoco Rossa. I have finally learned that to have a lot of heads of radicchio, you have to grow a lot of it.  About every third plant is forming a really good head.  Some of the others have gone straight to a bolt - sending up a flower stalk, and some have turned into a ridiculous loose fluffy clump of leaves that should be in a head, but didn’t quite manage it.  Fortunately, the chickens love them, and can eat their fill of the unusable plants.

Chicken family happily feasting on outer leaves of radicchio

The delicate way the Fedco seed catalogue describes this unpredictable unreliability of radiccio amuses me:  “These radicchios are easy to raise from transplants although they have not yet been refined to absolute uniformity…”

That’s okay.  I like it.  I like the imperfection, and the wildness of it.  Our heads of radicchio are often a little bigger, softer, and looser than the rock-hard, small, dry grocery store radicchio heads.  If you are buying radicchio from me at the market, I’ve left some of the larger outer leaves on to keep them fresher - you can strip these off and find more of a head inside.

Beautifully headed and ready for picking

These things are as gorgeous as a rose, to me.

Two of our favorite ways to eat radicchio are cooked lightly with bacon, vinegar, and maple syrup, or mixed with frisée endive and tossed with a garlic-anchovy dressing and parmesan cheese.  Ohhhh, deliciousness.  I think that people often don’t know how to work with the bitter element in bitter greens and cooking, and therefore avoid it.  If you don’t think you like bitter greens, the key is to either cook it, which softens the bitterness, or to mix it with other greens or other foods to dilute the bitterness, or to dress it with flavors that compliment and change the bitterness.  (Or all three!)

Vinegar and acid flavors work magic on bitter chicories.  It seems like the bite of the acidity covers, or cuts, or changes the bitter flavor, and somehow, leaves it tasting sweet in the aftertaste.  All kinds of vinegar, and lemon can be used.  I also like a sour-sweet combination, like the vinegar-maple syrup dressings we often make.  Strong flavors - parmesan cheese, anchovies, garlic, good olive oil, and salty meats all also complement the bitters and work to the improvement of both tastes.

Dragonwood Radicchio with Bacon, Maple, and Vinegar:

pink and white hearts of radicchio, being shredded for sautée

Slice up a head of radicchio, or two (it cooks down to a fraction of its raw size) into fettuccini-like ribbons. While you’re slicing, start a skillet heating, and fry some diced bacon.  Slice up an onion or some shallots.  When the bacon is done, toss in the shallots, then the cut-up radicchio, into the pan with the bacon, and toss and turn it to coat it with the oil.  Add a tablespoon or so of red wine, or apple cider, or balsamic vinegar, and a splash of maple syrup, and salt and pepper as desired.  The heat should be high enough to cook away most of the juices as they form.  Keep tossing and stirring while the radicchio wilts down and cooks - just a few minutes is all it takes, and then it is done.  We like this topped with a fried egg and toast on the side, for breakfast.

If you like to grill, there are all kinds of grilling recipes for radicchio - here is a delicious-sounding example.

June is just a really busy month on a farm.  I don’t think we realized how busy until a little break time in July and raising our heads above water let us think about it.  Lots of days we went out to work early in the morning, did our other jobs through the day, and worked in the gardens again from 6 til the light faded finally at 10 pm.  I think most days in June I planted something, somewhere.  Now it’s July, and the fruits (and vegetables!) of those labors are showing how worth it it all was:

Going to market on Thursdays has been lots of fun.  Also lots of work, but lots of fun.   Here’s the market stand highlights over the past few weeks at the Westside Farmer’s Market:

Yes, we have been busy.   A busy month since the last post.  With the long day length, we are often outdoors until 9:30 or 10 pm.  Two people, working a little farm, with two other jobs.  I try to grab the camera and document whenever I can, and imagine blog posts in my head as I’m working that don’t seem to materialize at the end of the long day. We about doubled the size of the “market field” this year, plus added on some other plots in other locations.  This is still so small compared to the farmer friends I know, but it’s just the two of us, no other workers.  We’ve got celery, celeriac, radicchio, arugula, potatoes, radishes, leeks, popcorn, tomatoes, basil, squash and eggplant, and a few watermelon, growing here in this patch.  And a few flowers. We’ve planted so many plants, so many rows.  After the big rains and the sudden heat, there was a lot of fast growth.  So rewarding! Part of our system is to mulch heavily when we can, shown in the photo above.  Saves time on weed control later, improves the soil, and holds in the moisture!  I do a lot of interplanting too.  Slower-growing vegetables like celery, leeks, onions, broccoli, are interplanted with fast growing ones - lettuce, radishes, arugula, spinach.  We get two or three times the crops from the same space of ground, and reduce the areas where weeds can grow too.

The Westside Farmers Market is in full swing now.  Yesterday was the third week, and we were lucky with the weather, dodging rainstorms, and having a great day.  We love this little market!  Come and find us there on Thursdays from 3-7pm.

This week for market we harvested lots of wonderful french breakfast radishes…….and greens………

and rhubarb……..

and garlic scapes!

September was crazy. A lot of things happened.

Digging potatoes in the dusk, the night before the last market.

A lot of sleep lost, a lot of muscles, brains, and heartstrings strained.  Someone gave me a small pendant inscribed with the words, “This too shall pass”.  And so it shall.  September is gone, and here is October.

The market is finished.  Yesterday was the last day - 18 weeks gone in a flash.   We had to miss Week 17, and we are grateful and delighted that so many of you wrote or stopped by yesterday to say how much you had missed us the week before.  It has been incredibly rewarding to work with the folks running the Westside Farmers Market, the other venders there, and the customers coming through.  A huge thanks from us, to all of you.

We will still have available for individual sales:   Eggs, Garlic, Popcorn, limited Winter Squash, Potatoes, and other small items such as herbs, wreaths, hot pepper strings, and other garden odds and ends.  You can contact us here, and let us know if you would like to be added to our email list for delivery/pickup of the goods we will have available.

And here, we move into our season of final garden scavenging and preserving, preparing and planting fall beds, woodcutting, and taking stock of the year’s accomplishments.  And….shhh….we may.actually.have.more.time.to.write.about.it…  Hope springs eternal!

And platitudes rock.

So, I just had to post our lunch today, or is it dinner.  Our tomatoes have been SO incredibly good.  They’ve also been bursting at the seams, the rains have been so frequent and the humidity high.  Our horizontal tomato bushes (hardly ‘plants’) are going nuts, and it’s way hard to keep up.

BLT w/ S4L in the making

With tomatoes, we’ve had so many split fruit this year that we have only been able to take a small fraction to the Westside Farmers Market.  The best go to market, and the rest stay here for canning and eating.  But today, we made BLT’s from two of the nicest tomatoes we took to market… and nobody bought.  The crazy thing is, these are just incredibly good eating tomatoes, the kind everyone says “Oh, I wish I could find tomatoes like I remember from the garden when I was a kid.  Now THOSE were tomatoes!”  Well that’s what these are.

But the thing is, they don’t look like we remember them.  And I think it’s a problem of implanted memories, like the ones they worry about in criminal trials where witnesses try to remember details of something that happened years ago, but they include details and ideas that they may believe are actual memories, but are really just implanted ideas that have insinuated themselves over the years.

In the case of tomatoes, we’ve become conditioned to believe that these mystical tomatoes are red.  Perfectly red.  Uniformly and gorgeously consistently red.  Because that’s what line we are being fed by the grocery stores.  We can’t help it… Agribusiness has bred red tomatoes with long shelf life for decades now, and that’s what we see in the store shelves.  These tomatoes get red before they’re really ripe, so that they can be picked early when they’re hard and can be transported easily.  They’ve got tough skins so that they hold up to transport from big farm to distributor warehouse and warehouse to big box grocery produce section.  They treat them with ethylene gas to help ripen them up.  And the message is not just in front of us everytime we go to the produce section… and who (besides us) doesn’t go to the produce section?

These damn perfect red hard skinned tasteless bastards of agribusiness are sold to us with every TV commercial touting “Fresh!”.  Pizza commercials, restaurant commercials, pasta commercials, and in countless magazine articles.  Red.  All red, consistently red, inside and out red.

But it’s not where the really good tomatoes are.  It’s not what we grow to eat at Dragonwood, and it’s not what we sell (at least not very much).  We grow the tomatoes we want most to eat, and they’re not very red typically, they’re not very consistent, they’re just not usually “beautiful” to the modern consumer’s eye.  I’m not going to list off all the varieties we grow… and I certainly can’t pick every tomato out of the garden basket and tell you which it is (Mandy can, mostly).  They’re yellow and orange, purple and green, and usually inconsistent.  Some have green shoulders even when they’re perfectly ripe, and some have such deep purple insides that they look a bit rotten from the outside!  But I’ve learned the difference between conventional (red!) beauty and tomatoes prized for their taste.  I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this tomato season.  In fact, I want to thank all those customers at the market this week who didn’t pick the best tomatoes so that they could go into my lunch sandwich today.  But I do hope they (some of them) might read this, and at their next market go to the vendors who prize their tomatoes for flavor, who have mostly tomatoes that look funny (less than perfect red), and talk tomato with the growers, and take home a variety of funny looking tomatoes to relish.  Vive la différence!

Oh, I got off topic didn’t I?  We have no (capital L) lettuce these days, so our sandwiches had green bean slaw, which you can see in the photo.  It’s fantastic stuff… beans + non-iodized salt + time, and bingo, what a delish relish.  With a side of tomato wedges, all colors.  Mmmm.

One of the interesting parts about doing the farmers market has been observing people, and their funny interactions with produce.

Sometimes it involves little experiments with human nature.  For example, last year, I noticed that as the garlic basket became picked over, people had left one very large bulb of garlic, and were choosing smaller ones instead.  I picked it up to see why - was it broken up?  Was it moldy?  Was there a crushed clove on it?  Nope.  The stem on top that the plant grows out of was twisted around the bulb at an unusual angle.  When we planted it, we probably got the clove headed the wrong direction in the soil, and the plant grew around itself a bit it compensate.  Do people eat the stem?  No!  It’s part of the dry papery coverings that get peeled and (hopefully) composted.  The rest of the bulb was enormous and perfect, but people were scared off by a kinked stem at the top.

So, out of curiosity, as the season wore on I left that bulb of garlic in the mix, and didn’t cut off its funny stem.   The garlic options became fewer and  fewer, smaller and smaller, but still, everyone rejected the bulb with the kinked stem. People were seriously buying garlic half its size, for the same price, instead of settling for a large but slightly unusual shape.  It never sold!  We took it home, and just to complete the experiment, I opened it up and peeled some cloves.  The largest ones were big enough to save as seed garlic, so I kept them for planting.  The rest was perfect - larger than the garlic we usually get to use.  We save the best for seed, sell the next best, and use the smalls for everyday ourselves.

Tomatoes always get a lot of debate and commentary.  We are growing Roman Candle sauce-type tomatoes this year.  One source description reads “… pure yellow banana shaped tomatoes…. very flavorful and have very few seeds. Excellent for making salsa, sauce, and gourmet dishes…”  They are lovely!  Bright yellow, they really do look just like a big strong candle flame.  Wonderful flavor.  Didn’t sell a single one at the market so far!  People ask about them.  They pick them up, exclaim, talk about them, and then say things like the person who asked in a woeful tone, “But what do you DOoooo with a YELLOW TOMATO???”  Or, “Well, my husband would never eat a YELLOW tomato.”

How I feel about all this depends on my mood, and most of the time my reaction is a jovial desire to educate people, tell them about what they could try, how good something is, encourage experimentation, etc.  There’s a bit of suppressing a laugh, grin, or teasing remark.  Sometimes though, I try not to wonder at their families eating FD&C yellow 5-colored cakes, candy, pickles, popcorn, jello, etc….but not, OMG, a YELLOW TOMATO.

To my delight, though, every now and then these sorts of interactions are offset by the really satisifying ones.  The woman who hurried up to the table and excitedly pulled the beautiful white-and-lavender unusually-shaped eggplants out and set them on the scale in a towering pile, for example.  She knew what she was getting.    She wasn’t among the crowd who “just can’t even think of it as an eggplant if it’s not dark-skinned”.

I think maybe I grow for these individuals.  We’re not big producers, and part of the reason I grow my own food is to get interesting produce I can’t afford to buy, or that can’t be mass produced:  The gourmet types, the thin delicate-skinned varieties, the colorful nutrient-rich varieties, the skinny flavorful beans, the finely textured baby veggies, chemical-free.  Not the mainstream.  The mainstream makes the money, I suppose.  But recognizing quality and uniqueness brings an incomparable satisfaction.

On a lighter note, the funniest overheard quote of the day?  Next door to us, the Humane Society had a table display set up.  Behind them was one of Zingerman’s permanent lunch menu advertising signs.  A woman came up to the Humane Society’s table, eyeing the Zingerman’s sign behind them, and asked, “So - What’s your Soup-of-the-Day?”  Grin.

Short list of what we’ll be bringing to The WestSide Farmer’s Market tomorrow!

Eggs - reserved egg orders will be held for pickup until 6pm, and  unreserved eggs available on demand, while they last!

Bagged mixed baby lettuces

Bagged “Wild Baby Greens” mix

Lamb’s quarters -  amazingly delicious-nutritious right now!

Arugula

Head lettuce

Herbs

Rhubarb

Potted tomato plants

The greens are *really good* right now.  They grew fast in the heat, then have gotten juicy and crunchy in the rain.  They won’t last like this for very many weeks.  I have a theory that most people who think they don’t like greens haven’t gotten to taste really fresh, really good, really well-prepared greens.  Give them a try!

We’re so excited to be heading back, and we look forward to seeing you there!  Please come and visit us at the market!!

A little-known fresh spring delicacy we love is chive blossoms.  Chives themselves are greeted with great enthusiasm for about a month in the early spring, when we’ve generally run out of onions, gotten sick of dried herbs, and the new onion greens haven’t appeared yet.  Chives find their way into a lot of our cooking and salads in April and May, but by the end of May (especially if it’s been hot like this year) the greens can get a little boring.  And then - the blossoms arrive!

Chive blossoms can be used in any way that regular chopped chives are.  They are subtler on flavor, and beautiful to behold.  They’re especially nice as a garnish on top of salads, noodles, potato or egg salad, sushi, scrambled eggs, etc.

They come as cut flowers, (we’ll have them at Market) and are really easy to use in cooking:  just take the clump of blossoms between thumb and fingers and gently pull them off the stem.  Then scatter over a dish!

Today’s chive blossom recipe for us:

Cold Udon noodles with Baby Greens & Chive Blossoms

Cook the udon in boiling water, drain, and soak briefly in icewater to cool.  Meanwhile, chop green onions, a few radishes, a handful of fresh cilantro, and pull the blossoms off about 5 chive stems.  Make a dressing by combining olive oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a dash of maple syrup, and a bit of hot pepper oil, if desired.  I never measure - just add and experiment.  Lime juice is good here too.  When the noodles are cooled, drain them well, pour enough dressing over them to coat, and toss with the chopped onion, radish, cilantro, and chive blossom.  Prepare a  bed of greens on the plate, dress it lightly with a stream of the same dressing, and put a helping of the noodles on top.  Today we added an little cold leftover grilled steak and asparagus from last night.  Sprinkle on a few more chive blossoms for garnish, and enjoy!

We are going full tilt with work preparing to attend the market!  We do all the gardening and growing work ourselves, around each of our other jobs, and it’s been really busy.  We’re still tiny tiny tiny producers, but we’re focusing on quality and uniqueness rather than mass production.  We don’t use any kind of chemicals or poisons on the things we grow, ever.  And we don’t sell things we wouldn’t be excited about eating ourselves!

Greens have been excellent this spring!  This heat, however, may change that fast.  I’m hoping the lettuces can hold out a little bit, with the help of mulch, row covers, and interplanting with things like garlic and onions, that give a wee bit of shade. We expect to be back at the market with Dragonwood’s “Wild Baby Greens” mix at the opening next week.  Why “Wild”?  Mostly just a nickname they got last year - there’s often a little bit of the wild and unexpected, and we take full advantage of the self-seeding and regrowth of some of the crucifers and lettuces that we let naturalize, plus the additions of dandelion, lamb’s quarters, purslane, when they are young and tasty.  We had quite the devoted following of the greens last year, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all again.

The mix we’ve got going right now usually includes at least the following:

6-10 kinds of carefully chosen or heirloom lettuces

Baby Chard

3-4 types of baby Kale

Spinach

Arugula

Mache

Mizuna

Endive

We are usually able to accomodate special orders - if someone wants a bag of a certain green here and there, let us know!

See you at the market on Thursday June 3rd!