Some delights of spring: chard, kale, and lettuce

If you haven't dropped by the farmers' market, located in Smithville behind Ace Hardware, this is the perfect weekend to come on down. We've got two vendors selling fresh produce, so you can get the season's first lettuce, cabbage, kale, chard, and spring onions. The early birds got the eggs and fried pies; they go quick. There are all kinds of baked goods, canned goods, handmade soaps and lotions, vegetable and herb plants, fresh and dried herbs, and the best barbecue, hot wings, and smoked meats you've ever put in your mouth.

Saturday, June 9th we'll really kick off the produce season with a “grand re-opening”, but there's plenty of good stuff to be had right now!

The fresh produce season starts off with a profusion of greens. I've encountered more people than I can count who have been turned off eating greens by a run-in with mushy, bitter greens. I can't emphasize enough that properly prepared greens are never mushy, never tough, and not bitter.

One of the leafy greens that's in season right now is Swiss chard. Swiss chard looks almost identical to beet greens because it's in the same family as beets. Chard leaves are rich in phytonutrients, which provide antioxidants with powerful anti-inflammatory benefits. One cup of cooked chard will supply you with more than your recommended daily allowance of vitamins K and A, in addition to a slough of other vitamins and minerals, including vitamins C, E, and B vitamins, and minerals including calcium, potassium, magnesium, manganese, iron, fiber, and protein. Believe it or not, that list isn't complete, but it serves to demonstrate what a nutrient-dense food chard is.

Since chard is rich in protein and fiber, it is an excellent addition to your diet if you're managing diabetes. Protein and fiber help regulate the speed at which carbohydrates are converted to simple sugars during the digestive process, which minimizes blood sugar spikes.

Fresh chard isn't tough; you can use both the leaves and the ribs. I am absolutely in love with the bright colored ribs produced by the Bright Lights chard we grow at our farm. The variety of colors of the ribs represents a variety of phytonutrients, so including as many colors on your plate as possible ensures a wide variety of nutritional benefits!

You can use chard raw to dress your green salads, but people with a sensitivity to oxalic acid should eat their chard cooked. Quickly boil the chard, but only for 3 minutes. Pour off the water and season with a touch of salt and pepper and a dash of your favorite vinegar. You can also lightly sauté a bunch of chopped chard in some heated olive or coconut oil and season it the same way. It only needs to be sautéed for 5-7 minutes over medium-high heat. The color should still be green when it's done cooking—never, never brown! Sautéed chard is a great side dish served with pork chops, steak, chicken breasts, fish fillets, or tempeh or tofu. 

Chard pairs remarkably well with tomato sauce, so when it's in season, I almost never make spaghetti without chard leaves in the sauce. I chop up the ribs and sauté them with the onions and garlic that start off my spaghetti sauce. About five minutes before the sauce is ready to eat, I throw in the uncooked, chopped chard leaves with a handful of fresh herbs. After just a few minutes of lightly simmering, the leaves are still bright green, and the herbs have infused the sauce. As an aside—did you know that six leaves of oregano have the same antioxidant content as an entire apple?

Another fantastic fresh green available right now is kale. If the only kale you've ever eaten was out of a can or that pre-chopped abomination in the grocery store, I implore you to give it one more try. 

Kale is a nutritional powerhouse. It contains vitamins K, A, and C, manganese, and fiber, in addition to having antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties. Its nutritional profile also includes high concentrations of carotenoids and flavonoids which have powerful cancer preventative properties.

Any of the recipes listed above for chard work just as well for kale. In fact, kale and chard mixed together make an excellent combination. However, my very favorite way to enjoy kale is by eating an entire cookie sheet worth of baked kale chips.

Baking kale chips is the ultimate route to winning over new kale eaters. No kidding, it's as easy as this: Lightly toss the washed and dried leaves with a little olive oil. They shouldn't be drenched, just lightly dressed. Arrange the leaves in a single layer on a cookie sheet and season with a very small amount of sea salt and pepper; add some garlic powder if you're into that. If you're feeling fancy, sprinkle on a little freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Bake in a preheated 350º oven for 7-12 minutes, depending on your oven. You want the leaves crispy and dried but only barely browned. Before trying it, you can't conceive of how delicious this easy recipe really is.

Fresh salads are another delight of the spring season. Lettuce can shake off a light frost, and some varieties will hold out through some hot weather, but by the time the tomatoes are rolling in, the lettuce will be gone. Iceburg lettuce is popular and familiar, but the world of lettuce is vastly more exciting and aesthetically pleasing than those ubiquitous light green heads. You can grow varieties that are lime green with splashy red speckles, some with frilly, curled leaves, heads that grow a foot and a half tall, intense red frilly leaves, loose-head buttercrunch varieties with soft red speckles, iceburg style heads with pink speckles; the list goes on and on and on.

We've all tried the usual ranch, honey mustard, and French style dressings, but you shouldn't limit yourself to such a finite palate. Fresh dressings are infinitely variable and extremely easy to make. I usually make them in a canning jar so I can put a lid on and shake to emulsify (combine) the ingredients and store the leftover dressing in the fridge. 

Here are a few of our farm's favorite dressings:

For a simple vinaigrette dressing use a 1 to 3 ratio of vinegar to oil. Combine red wine, balsamic, or white wine vinegar with extra virgin olive oil. Add a dash of salt and pepper and maybe some dried herbs. Shake until emulsified and eat up! You can add freshly chopped garlic or garlic powder, use freshly chopped herbs instead of dried herbs, or try out grapeseed or sunflower oil instead of olive oil. You can't mess it up, so just experiment until you find a flavor combination that knocks your socks off. This style of simple vinaigrette goes great with a salad that's dressed up with feta cheese, green onions, and chopped kalamata or black olives.

To give your salad a more gourmet, exotic twist, try a ginger, peanut butter dressing. I know this combination of ingredients will sound a little strange, but I absolutely guarantee it'll blow you away. Combine about a tablespoon of peanut butter (the creamy, natural kind works best, but I've been known to make this with the regular crunchy kind, too), a teaspoon of soy sauce or Bragg's amino acids, a plop of honey, a half inch chunk of fresh ginger, grated, a dash of black pepper, a couple tablespoons of white wine or apple cider vinegar, and about a ¼ cup of olive oil. Shake, shake, shake until all the ingredients have combined, and give it a taste. Depending on your palate, you might want a little more tang, so add some more vinegar, or maybe a little sweeter, so add some more honey. I usually end up adding twice as much ginger because I just can't get enough of it. The recipe is just a guideline; play with it to suit your taste. We love this dressing so much, sometimes I'll make an enormous salad just as an excuse to make this dressing.

Since you've got ginger leftover from trying the peanut butter dressing, the next night you can try out a lemonade ginger dressing. Combine equal parts sugar and lemon juice, add as much freshly grated ginger as you want, a dash of salt to bring out the flavor, and top off with extra virgin olive oil at the same 1 to 3 ratio, using the lemon juice instead of vinegar. This sweet and tangy dressing pairs phenomenally well with a salad that's jazzed up with some chopped fruit, like apples, strawberries, or peaches.

Just because most of the fresh produce right now is green doesn't mean it has to be boring or bland. Part of the joy of seasonal eating is enjoying the changing palate throughout the year and becoming a more robust and creative cook. Experimentation is fun. There's literally no end to the number of dishes you can create utilizing fresh greens!

Planting those babies

Written by: Karley Thompson

for the DeKalb County Times

The market was bustling last week! If you want to try those chicken thighs and Boston butts everyone is talking about, you'll have to get there pretty early. Fried pies, baked goods, granola, soaps, lotions, salsa, pork rinds, fresh and dried herbs, early season lettuce, kale, and garlic scapes will all be available this week. You can also pick up herb, flowers, squash, and tomato plants.

The market will have a grand re-opening event on Saturday, June 9^th! Most of the produce vendors will have fresh veggies by then, and then we'll really get the 2012 season cranking. 

It's the perfect time for planting those veggie bedding plants. The soil is good and moist from this past weekend's rain, and unless it all peters out before it gets here, there's a chance for more rain the forecast. We usually plant in the late afternoon or early evening, after the heat of the day has passed and the garden is shady, or on cloudy days. It can be hard on the little plants if you put them out on a hot, bright sunny day. If that's the only time you can get out in the garden, you can ease the trauma by being very gentle with their roots, giving them a good drink, and maybe providing a little shade that first day.

Some plants are hardier than others, as far as how much abuse they'll tolerate and still give you good production. For example, plants in the cucurbitaceae family, like squash, melon, and cucumber, are extremely tender. They are particularly unappreciative of having their roots disturbed, and they don't perform very well after becoming root bound in pots. We do transplant some squash and cucumbers, but we are extremely gentle when handling their roots balls. We're also sure to get them in ground by the time they have their fourth set of true leaves. These plants practically grow before your eyes, and their roots grow even faster. That's why most people skip the delicate transplanting and just direct sow these crops.

The cucurbitaceae are nutrient hogs and will pretty much take as much compost as you can give them. These are often the volunteers that pop up from compost piles, or wherever the chickens drop the seeds. Since they grow in compost piles, it's probably not surprising that they'll grow in a hill of mounded compost. Most gardeners plant two or three seeds per hill and thin to the strongest plant. Cucumbers, vining squash, and even melons appreciate being trellised, but be sure to use sturdy materials. For the heavier fruit, you'll even need to make a sling.

Not all plants needs such tenderness, though. The tomato plant can take a lot, perk up, and then produce a lot. Last year we got way behind on our transplanting to-do list and ended up with dozens of tomato plants that were floppy, almost two feet tall, and still in their 4 inch containers. We picked off the suckers and leaves up about 75% of the stem, used a post hole digger to dig some massive holes, and laid the plants on their sides. Once we filled in the dirt, only about 25% of the plants were left above the soil. Those plants ended up being over 7 feet tall and continued producing through those two scorching months without rain and without irrigation. When we pulled the plants up at the end of the season, we could see that the entire buried stem had sprouted a 

serious root system. 

Peppers can also tolerate quite a bit of abuse, once temperatures are comfortably warm. Small pepper plants will sulk after cool nights and will just huddle down and not grow very quickly if the days aren't warm enough. Not to worry; the weather right now is perfect, so get those pepper plants outside. The stems of pepper plants will also sprout roots, so we also bury the peppers deeper than they are planted in their containers. 

We're experimenting with the peppers this year. We buried up to 75% of the stem of some of the peppers, and others we only buried about 25%. I'll report later in the season and let you know how the experiment is going. 

Peppers and tomatoes are heavy feeders, so they benefit from soils with a lot of organic matter. Both of these nightshade cousins may develop blossom end rot, drop their flowers, or produce cracked fruit with uneven watering, so we always use a thick layer of organic mulch to keep in the moisture. As I've mentioned before, we use old hay. Many gardeners prefer not to use hay because of the weed seeds, but it is locally available and provides drastic moisture retention and soil tilth improvement, so we deal with the weeds.

Many gardeners find that foliar feedings of an Epsom salt dilution are beneficial to pepper and tomato plants. Epsom salt contains magnesium and sulfur in a highly soluble form. Lime is a common garden amendment to the highly weathered, acidic clay soils in our region, since lime is composed of calcium carbonate, which is a base. In addition to raising the pH, lime adds calcium to the soil, but soil calcium and magnesium must be in the proper balance in order for the plants to be able to utilize the available calcium. Since the magnesium in Epsom salts is highly soluble, it provides a boost of nutrients to the plants. 

One tablespoon to a gallon is all you need for a good Epsom salt foliar feeding. Foliar feeding means fertilizing your plants by spraying a solution on their leaves. Very early morning is the best time for foliar feeding. You don't want to spray the solution during the heat of a sunny day because the plants need to be able to respire to tolerate the heat. Many gardening advice sources advise not to spray in the evenings, so as to not encourage mildew problems. That being said, we almost always spray in the evenings because that's when we get around to it. Thus far, we haven't had any mildew problems. 

If you're concerned or just curious about the nutrient levels in your soils, you can have your soil tested through the local extension office or a private lab. If you're not sure if your pepper and tomato plants would benefit from an Epsom salt feeding, you can always do an experiment and only spray one or two of your plants and compare their performance over a couple days or weeks.

Part of the fun of gardening is experimentation, and all the exercise you get from growing all that fresh, healthy produce is a great perk. Experimenting with new methods and unusual varieties keeps each year exciting and each iteration of your garden novel. Coming up with new trellising ideas, or garden layouts, or hypotheses as to why one plant out performed another or the beans were better last year than this year exercises your mind, and you can't help but do dozens of repetitions of glute, hamstring, and quadricept exercises out in your garden!

Garlic scapes

image from Fifth Season Garden Co

This weekend at the market you'll be able to pick up handmade soaps and lotions, fried pies, baked goods, barbecue, smoked meats, and tomato and other summer vegetable plants. If you're putting plants in the ground right now, be sure you're prepared to give them some water. The soil is dry, and the days are hot. I recently read that our area's average rainfall in April is around 4 inches, but we only received two this year. It's hard to imagine that this time last year, the soil was water logged, and we were worried about the creek flooding our garden.

It seems pretty much everything is happening a month early this year. The dogwoods, mayapples, blackberries, and redbuds were all early. We were eating mounds of watercress well into May last year, but this year it's already become very spicy and is flowering. We are still using the flowers to spice up and beautify our salads. Our elephant garlic (which is actually a leek) sent up its scapes over a week ago already, and I saw the first scapes on our hard neck garlic at the beginning of this week. Those are a month early, too.

Garlic scapes are the flowering stalk sent up by each head of garlic. Each clove of garlic that you plant and mulch in the fall will produce a head of cloves, and each of those heads will send up a scape. Some people leave the scapes on the plant, and some people who cut the scapes just throw them away. Cutting the scapes encourages development of bigger cloves, and scapes are absolutely delicious.

You can cook the scapes the same way you cook green beans. They have the same crisp, crunchy texture of a fresh green bean with the flavor and kick of raw garlic. You can sauté the scapes in some butter and olive oil, which will tone down their punch a little, and dress them with just a touch of salt. You can chop and add them to stews and soups just before serving for a sharp, raw garlic accent or add them ten minutes before serving to mellow the flavor a bit.

We let our scapes grow until they develop their first curl. They are usually 6 or 7 inches long at that point, but the flowering head is still firmly encased. You can pick them later, but the lower part of the stalk will get tough as the scape gets taller. The case around the flowering head will also get a little tougher as the plant matures, but you can always just snip it off. If the garlic goes to blossom, you can use the blossoms raw to add a beautiful garnish to your cooked dishes or to elevate your salads from blasé to gourmet.

You should dig your garlic after the leaves have turned yellow but before the whole plant turns totally brown. Use a fork to loosen the soil before pulling them up to reduce the number of heads that get left behind. Even with careful harvesting, it seems like you'll inevitably miss a couple cloves which will happily sprout and show up next year.

Cure the garlic by placing the whole plant in the shade where it will have good air circulation. Some people also cure their garlic right where it was harvested, but the flavor of some varieties of garlic changes when exposed to sunlight. When the papers are thoroughly dried, snip off the stem with some hand shears. To prepare your seed stock, gently separate the cloves and save some of the largest to plant in the fall.

For your culinary garlic, leave the heads in tact and store in a dark, cool, dry place. Stored garlic can withstand light freezing and thawing, but should be kept from freezing through on very cold nights. You'll be able to enjoy your garlic well into the following spring.