You can't "beet" free greens

The "Eat More Kale" campaign might finally be working. But there are other leafy green vegetables out there, if you're open to some introductions.

Kale is cool these days. Everybody's eating kale salad, kale crisps, and drinking kale smoothies. I like a little kale in my salad, but mostly, I like it steamed or braised. I eat some kind of greens nearly every day, more in the summer when they're abundant. Our farm share has been running for a month, and always starts up with plenty of tender young greens. The first shares include turnips, beets, and kohlrabi, all with their greens attached. I've been cooking them all up together in a quick saute with garlic scapes and onions.

These greens feel like "extra" because in past years, I wouldn't have kept the greens. This year, I've been separating the greens from their bulbs or roots, sorting the edible leaves, and composting the rest, to make it easier to fit everything in. Often I'll decide what order to cook vegetables by how unwieldy they are to store. A whole Napa cabbage reduced to two recipes of mustard cabbage with cumin and tomato? Yes, please. I put half in the freezer and we ate the other half last week.

Strawberries were here and now they're gone, ditto sugar snap peas. We captured a few quarts of each and froze them, but we're already moving into green bean season. The year runs so fast, especially in the summer. Before I know it, it will be tomato season.

This past winter was a difficult one for the two of us. A chronic back problem flared up, and I have spent almost a year in bed, on heavy pain medication. Physical therapy, chiropractic, and orthopedic specialists haven't yet put me back together again. I can't ride my bike five miles to pick berries, this summer.

Euro-sealed sugar snap peas

After a winter of having to be taken care of, I want to be back on my feet, but I still rely on Kevin more than I did last summer, and one of those ways is that he now gets the farm share on Mondays after work, instead of me biking out there myself some time during the day to do it. I still process most of what he brings home. I can stand more comfortably than I can stoop or sit, so I wash and stem and label and freeze. We have a new Euro-sealer this year, too. Kevin put up some root vegetables from the winter share, to get us through the spring. We still have a few frozen items hanging around from past seasons, and are putting up some more every week.

Food is one of my love languages, and an easy tongue for some that can bridge awkwardness on both sides. Lee used to come over with fruit I'd never tasted before: durian is one of his favorites. A friend who's new in town, but grew up in upstate New York, often brings me food gifts when she comes over. One time she brought a beet salad, and the last time I'd eaten a beet salad was when I made one for my former girlfriend, Carolyn, when I was first courting her. I have been telling myself for years that I don't like beets, remembering one I tasted as a kid (off June's salad, in a fancy restaurant in Maine.) Now I ask Kevin to bring home beets in the farm share so I can roast them, and eat their greens. Roasted, they have a wonderful texture. Sometimes they're still a bit more earthy than I'm accustomed to, but I want to invite in more flavors again. I find myself craving Carolyn's beet enchiladas, a dish I would never have considered making without having tasted hers.

Fresh lamb's quarters

This time back from visiting New York, Nellie brought a pint of enormous blueberries from her mother's yard. Kevin took half of them and made blueberry pancakes that reminded me of a childhood summer, picking wild blueberries and eating them in pancakes cooked over a fire.

She also brought back two kinds of weeds she likes and has talked up to me, for me to try. One is purslane (feature image), and tastes very mild, like iceberg lettuce, so I've washed it and added it to my salad mix. The other is lamb's quarters, which have matured enough that Nellie suggested cooking it instead of eating it raw. The leaves are delicate, like spinach. I've sauteed them gently with a little bit of scallion and garlic scape from the farm.

The up side of not being able to get the farm share, is that now Kevin gets to enjoy the pleasure of the share room and u-pick fields. He reports that he sings and dances in the share room, he's so happy about the vegetables. I know the feeling: the produce glows from the weathered wooden bins, like the treasures in a video game. This is what we were born to find, and it's deeply satisfying to do what we're made to do.

Lamb's quarters sauteed with scallions and scapes

Able to choose based on their natural vegetal allure, Kevin brings home a few things he would not have requested, when I was making the farm run. He has been beguiled by the Swiss chard. He shows it to me explaining that it just looked so beautiful, he couldn't not take some.

Read more on greens: Getting the best from your farm share

How to harvest the fruits of the field

Advice on picking beans, berries, tomatoes, and more this summer.

If you’ve got a you-pick as part of your farm share, or you’re planning to go to a commercial you-pick farm this season, you’ll want to be prepared to make the best of your time. Going out for the fun of berry picking or choosing a jack o’ lantern pumpkin is one thing, but if you’re out there to bring in a harvest of food for your pantry or freezer, you will want to make the most of your time.

Fruit or vegetable?
But what if I want vegetables? you ask right away, thinking of green beans, tomatoes. In fact, most you-pick fields are for fruit: tomatoes are a botanical fruit, not a vegetable, as are pumpkins, eggplants, peppers. Green beans are seed pods; not exactly fruit, but closer to the meaning of the word than vegetable, which is everything else: undifferentiated plant matter. When I think of harvesting a vegetable, I think of taking the whole plant, or at least the parts it’s using: leaves, stems.

It’s not that easy
My first job harvesting, I merely held the clipboard while my new boss, Terry, wielded the machete, decapitating cabbages neatly at ground level. I began to understand that harvesting is a skill, not something to stumble into and expect to be any good at.

The cabbage harvest came in January; it was in Florida, with growing seasons all year round. My next lessons in bringing in the crop would come with my mother-in-law, who took me with her to the strawberry you-pick fields. Here, I got lessons that could be more broadly applied.

Make hay while the sun shines
Make the time to pick when the picking is easy, or you will lose too much of your time to gleaning instead of getting a high return on your investment.

Bring containers
Bring containers to pick into that will protect easily bruised fruit. I bring stacks of plastic quart yogurt containers to pick berries and herbs into. Green beans are sturdy and can be picked into a cloth grocery sack. Tomatoes need sturdy-sided buckets to help prevent crushing.

Don’t be a redneck (unless you want to)
Wear a hat and clothing that will protect your neck from the sun. The term “redneck” comes from the burn a farmer gets across the back of his neck, working outside. If you pick shirtless, you may end up with your neck and shoulders blackened while your belly remains as pale as it started, because to pick, you must bend, kneel, squat, or otherwise get down as close as possible to plant level. Child labor begins to make sense, here.

Hide and seek
The fruits of most plants will hide under the leaves, if they can, to avoid burning in the sun. You can’t see the ripe fruit easily by standing over the rows and surveying the leaves. Your eyes will try to pick out the color of sweet berries, and will find only the sunburnt outermost leaves of plants, crisp against the sandy bed.

Push back the leaves so you can see the stems, and let your eyes adjust. It can take several seconds of focus on the inner parts of the plant before your brain can play the “Where’s Waldo?” game it was designed to play: find the food.

This focus is particularly important when the food isn’t bright red and round. Ripe green bean pods look very much like the stems of green bean plants. The critical eye you are developing in the field is for what the ripe fruit looks like, so it leaps to your eye.

Eat some
If it can be eaten raw, brush off any visible dirt and have a bite. It helps motivate you for the picking and processing, and if your body is pleased with the food, it may help you find it more easily while you’re out there in the field, picking.

Avoid waste
Don’t bother to pick the underripe, the overripe, the split and the damaged. Nothing gets bigger after it’s picked, and most fruit will not continue to ripen. Strawberries don’t ripen after you pick them; tomatoes, once they’ve reached mature green (a paler shade), tomatoes will ripen off the vine. Don’t pick more than you can clean and process before it begins to wilt. Don’t pick what you don’t like to eat.

Bottom up
Note where the ripe fruit is on the first plants, and continue to look in those places on subsequent plants. Tomatoes ripen in hands, or clusters, from the bottom to the top of the staked vine. Work your way methodically down the row, not skipping the first or last plants in the row, or those that have fallen over or been overtaken by weeds. In fact, gleaning after other you-pickers, who are inevitably amateurs, you find that these are precisely the places that the leery avoid. Some of the fattest berries are in the tall weeds on the edge of the patch.

Processing
When you get your haul home, clean and process it as quickly as possible. Enlist friends and family to help with the processing. It’s the most boring part, and the easiest for even the unskilled and uncoordinated to do.

Wash everything gently and thoroughly. Discard anything you’ve brought home that isn’t fit to eat. Remove tips and strings from green beans, hull berries, blanch and skin tomatoes … research the food you’re going to put up before you even set out, so you know what will be involved after you come home from the fields.

Clean up and plan something easy for dinner.

Rest.
You earned it.




Read more on "Getting the best from your farm share"

Real milk is available in Massachusetts

Milk is an important food. It’s one of the earliest foods of agriculture. It’s a whole USDA food group. But the milk sold in stores today is, by and large, not the same as the milk that we’ve consumed for thousands of years.



As was pointed out in a recent Grist article, one gallon of commercially available milk could contain milk from cows on farms around the country--even the world. In order for the food industry to safely process milk on such an enormous scale, they have to pasteurize the milk. Pasteurization kills bacteria, but also beneficial enzymes and organisms that are part of what makes milk so good for you. Homogenization, by which cream and milk are prevented from separating, and other modern processes routinely used in milk production change some of its fundamental qualities, making modern milk unlike the milk of the 1920s and earlier.


In a few places in the country, raw milk is available for sale, usually only directly from the farmer and not through a store. In Massachusetts, licensed raw milk dairy farmers can sell their own raw milk on their own farms. These raw milk producers are usually small, and are held to very high standards by the USDA. The USDA has cracked down on milk buying clubs, farmers who sell their milk raw, and even people who carpool to farms to buy raw milk, in places where these are prohibited by law.


While organic baby spinach and ground turkey are knowingly sold in this country with contaminants, and food recalls remain optional even in cases where people are sickened or die from food poisoning from a known source, raw milk sold directly from its farm of origin continues to be treated as a dangerous substance.

Credit: Farmageddonmovie.com

“The War on Real Milk” has been documented by Kristin Canty, independent film producer and director, small farms advocate, and Massachusetts local, in her debut film, “Farmageddon; The Unseen War on American Family Farms.” Canty tells the stories of farmers who people trust with their lives, their livelihoods destroyed in the name of public health. People fighting for access to raw milk are part of a political movement based on the freedom to choose what we put into our bodies.


My husband and I put our trust in our local farmers, not the USDA. This weekend there were at least two raw milk related events on farms in the “hill country” of  the northern Pioneer Valley. SideHill Farm, in Ashfield, held their “Raw Dairy Days” on Saturday afternoon. While we were late for the tour, any time is a good time to visit the farm stand: a shed full of freezers and refrigerators, where we stocked up on raw milk and frozen beef from their grass-fed herd of Normandes and Jerseys. Most milk sold in the US today is from dairy cattle of only one breed, the Holstein, which was bred for high milk production.

SideHill Farm is revered in these parts for their incredibly creamy yogurt, available for sale in area groceries as well as from the farm stand: I got a quart of that, too. Grass-fed can sometimes mean small and tough, even for what should be a fatty, tender cut. The ribeyes we bought from the SideHill freezer were a terrific deal, and large and well-marbled compared to some grass-fed steaks I’ve had from other area farms. 

On Sunday, we met up with a group touring Taproot Commons, a small dairy farm in Cummington. Here, Sarah Fournier-Scanlon uses intensive pasture management practices that fans of Joel Salatin will recognize on sight. As readers of Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” will recall from the chapter on Polyface Farm, this method allows livestock to engage in their natural behaviors, resulting in healthier pasture, cow, and hen, less work for the farmer, and more delicious, nutritious eggs and milk. When we arrived for the tour, the henhouse, which rested on a wagon, was parked in the middle of a small pasture. The rooster could be seen outside, guarding the house.



We joined the group of Weston A. Price Foundation members and Taproot Commons farm share owners in the milking barn. After talking about the milking schedule, we followed the farmer and a Jersey named Sparkle from the barn to the pasture. Here, we could see the hens, all within sight of the rooster, foraging along the tree line. As our farmer explained how she allows the hens to do the work of scattering the cow manure, rather than use a mechanical spreader, we stood in a semicircle around one tidy job and nodded. Next, we all picked our way across the mud to a neighboring pasture, and Sparkle joined two other cows, both Swiss. With the birth of Sparkle’s calf, Taproot Commons now has three dairy cattle in production. Fournier-Scanlon hopes to harness the new calf when it is older, to plow her vegetable fields.



Unlike commercial milk, which is both pasteurized and homogenized, raw milk separates into cream and skim milk. Shake the jar before pouring yourself a glass, and use it within five days to ensure freshness. The flavor is more complex, with sweet notes of pasture. If you like milk, or remember liking it as a child, raw milk will transport you with its purity of flavor. Normandes, Jerseys, and Swiss cows are all prized for the qualities of their milk, particularly in cheesemaking, because it is high in fat and protein.



After the Taproot Commons Farm tour, trays of milkshakes were passed around, and members of the local Weston A. Price Foundation sat at picnic tables and shared their packed lunches. If you would like to try raw milk and you live in Massachusetts, you can purchase a half-gallon jar from a local farmer who is authorized to sell raw dairy. Prices vary, but expect to pay $7 or so for your first half-gallon, which includes a deposit on the glass jar. For very small operations like Taproot Commons, properly washing and sterilizing the jars is time-consuming and not at all automated. The advantages of such hands-on dairy production, however, are a superior, raw, and very clean dairy product. As Fourier-Scanlon explained on Sunday, the standards for microorganisms in raw milk are exceedingly high, and USDA dairy inspectors visit frequently to ensure milk at Taproot Commons is safe to drink. The farmer of Taproot Commons is very proud of her raw milk’s test results.



To see “Farmageddon” this Friday in Boston, contact the AMC Boston Common 19 for show times and tickets; call (888) 262-4386 or visit www.amctheatres.com/BostonCommon. For other screening dates and times, and to see the trailer, visit the Farmageddon website: www.farmageddonmovie.com.

Gardening the Community an oasis in Springfield's Six Corners

The Hancock Street garden

Gardening the Community youths deliver their produce to market by bicycle

Childhood obesity and diabetes disproportionately affect people of color, poor people, and people who live in what are called “food deserts”: places where corner stores may abound, but few, if any, retailers sell fresh groceries.

Embarking on its fourth season, the Mason Square Farmer’s Market is an oasis in the Springfield food desert, serving the Six Corners neighborhood from an array of local producers of fresh fruits and vegetables and other farm-fresh foods. Held in the Baystate Mason Square Health Center parking lot, this seasonal, open-air farmer’s market is open to the public on Saturdays, from 10AM to 2PM from July through October. One of the vendors is Gardening the Community.

On Wednesday, I joined a tour of the Hancock Street garden led by Ibrahim Ali, Youth Director of Gardening the Community. While more than a dozen young gardeners worked near us in small groups, representatives of a local community task force learned about their work. One person on the tour who introduced herself to me gave me a briefing on how funding trickles down to support projects like this one. Deborah Albury has a daughter who worked for GtC, but this visit was in her role as Project Director of The Healthy Communities Collaborative. Albury explained one source of funding for projects like Gardening the Community that originates with state mandates for hospitals to invest in community health. State funding from the departments of Public Health and Nutrition is channeled through area hospitals under mandate, including Baystate, to organizations like the Mason Square Health Task Force, which distributes minigrants to small, local projects that foster the health of communities like Six Corners in Springfield.

Another way government dollars are channeled into growing gardens in urban deserts, is through food stamp (EBT/SNAP) benefits and the WIC program. Farmer’s markets all over Massachusetts accept these benefits, allowing the residents of the Six Corners neighborhood to go to the Mason Square Farmer’s Market and use cash, EBT/SNAP, or WIC benefits to buy fresh vegetables that were grown by the young people of their community, in nearby garden plots that nourish and beautify the area.

The most important growing that occurs in Gardening the Community, is what happens in the hands, hearts, and minds of the young people who work in these gardens. From volunteers as young as nine, to young adults in college, GtC grows experienced gardeners. The young people may earn a daily stipend or hourly wage for their labor, but more importantly, they learn valuable skills, an appreciation for what goes into producing food, and enthusiasm for the foods themselves. I heard one young man speaking of some herbs he had planted, that might have been threatened by invading neighborhood dogs: “My cilantro?” he said, putting the emphasis on the possessive. “That I grew?” He was invested.

By putting the young people in charge, from selecting which seeds to order, to selling the produce in the farmer’s market, Ali and GtC are growing future leaders. One young man I spoke to was emphatic and clear about the leadership skills that were fostered in the garden, telling me that they have given him practical experience and confidence in his ability to lead, wherever he is. This is a measure of wellness, for which everyone involved in Gardening the Community can be proud.

Getting the best from your farm share

Are you new to CSAs? If this is your first season in Community Supported Agriculture, welcome! A farm share is a great way to eat locally, and support a local farmer.

In case you haven't heard of a CSA before, this is how it works: you purchase your share of the season’s harvest from a farm offering shares, paying in advance so the farmer can prepare to serve all of his or her shareholders. There are meat, poultry, egg, dairy, and even fish CSAs in the Pioneer Valley, although the most common sort of farm share is a weekly supply of seasonal vegetables. Most are harvested for you, and some are even cleaned, while other crops are available as a pick-your-own arrangement.

Think of your weekly shares of fresh produce as a kind of game show: you’ve already bought them, and now the clock is ticking. Your challenges as a farm share owner are to enjoy these vegetables while they’re fresh, to eat them all week long, and to use all of the vegetables you bring home.

Here are some tips for getting the best experience from your farm share, early in the season.

1. Go green.

Most farm shares include lots of greens: some that you eat raw—salad greens—and some that you eat cooked. Cooking greens range from the delicate to the robust. They can all be sauteed, steamed, and added to soups and stews. If you have a recipe for a delicate green like spinach, you can substitute a similar green, like chard or callaloo, with very little difference. Collards and kale, both hearty cooking greens, are likewise interchangable.

Use delicate greens first, and plan to use heartier greens later in the week. Cold spots at the back of the fridge can burn greens. Store unwashed greens in plastic produce bags, kept tightly closed and stored in the produce drawer.

2. Start with a salad.

All summer long, expect to get salad greens in your farm share. It may be loose, or in heads. There may be different kinds of salad greens, ones you've never seen before. You can even eat a little bit of a salad green right out of the bin to find out if it’s very bitter, spicy, or strong, before deciding whether to take some home.

Try mixing a handful of an unfamiliar salad green in with your usual selection. Every few days, wash a big batch of salad greens and spin them dry. Use loose greens before heading lettuce. Store the washed greens in a sealed plastic bag in the fridge, and make them the base of not just side salads, but whole salad meals.

Our version of “chef salad” is at its simplest, sliced boiled eggs and bacon over salad greens. In their season, we add cucumbers and tomatoes from our share. You can add croutons, avocado, cheese, sprouts, roasted seeds, nuts, and any vegetable you can eat raw. Cold leftover sliced chicken, steak, pork loin, and salmon are all good over salad greens and dressed with your usual favorite salad dressing.

3. Try something new.

It’s healthy and fun to try new vegetables. If something new to you seems appealing, take enough to make so everyone in your family can try it, but not so much that you’re stuck with it if it’s not a hit. Ask farm workers how to prepare an unfamiliar vegetable, or write the name down and google it when you get home.

4. Only take what your family likes to eat.

You may take everything allowed in your weekly share, but there’s no reason to take what you already know your family doesn’t like.

5. Freeze some for later.

If you eat with the seasons, strawberries and asparagus are nearing their season’s end, but you can always freeze some to enjoy later. It’s not always more cost-effective to freeze produce that you purchase; rather, take advantage of opportunities to turn your share investment and sweat equity into convenience food for later. Hit the you-picks and freeze berries and green beans. Take some extra cooking greens from the “all you can use” bins, to blanch and freeze for next winter and spring.

6. Only take what you can process.

t’s tempting to pick as many strawberries as your family can use all year. Delicate produce has to be processed quickly, before it degrades. Another factor to consider is the relative value of your currently available freezer space against the value of the produce you’re considering freezing. Do you have room for four month’s worth of blanched kale? Maybe this will be the year you learn to can tomatoes. If so, start with a small batch and make sure you have everything you need to tackle a larger canning job.

7. Don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched.

That's what the old chicken farmers used to say, and it applies to produce, as well. You may have been counting on getting enough tomatoes to make a truly heroic amount of marinara, but the potato blight could destroy your farm's entire tomato crop. Strawberries can be abundant, and then rained out in a day. That's the nature of sharing risk with your farmers.

8. Just roll with it.

You leap into action when a crop is abundant; the other direction to flex is toward a backup plan for when there is little or nothing of something you've come to rely upon. Be glad you are not a subsistence farmer, and can go to the market, or pull something out of the freezer.

Accept bounty with gratitude, and losses with grace; these are the strategies for enjoying your farm share this season.