Heirloom Harvest

Green Days

This recipe comes to us from member Rosemary Coley, who recommends it for chard. John notes that chard is a few weeks away, and promises it would also be good with beet greens, which are in shares now. Keep those recipes coming! Editor's note: I made this tonight with lime juice instead of lemon, and with beet and Japanese greens and it was superlative.

4 cups chard or other greens

cooking spray or 1 Tbs olive oil

1 cup onion, chopped

3 garlic cloves, minced

6 oz chicken breast meat, cubed

2 Tbls water or lemon juice (lemon juice assists the body's absorption of calcium from the greens)

Optional: 1 cup rice, cooked

1 Tbls soy sauce

1/2 cup shredded cheese - the recipe calls for cheddar; I use Parmesan

Cut stems off greens and dice. Cut leaves into 1/2" strips. Spray nonstick skillet with cooking spray (or heat oil). Cook stems, onion and chicken over medium heat for 6 minutes. Add garlic; cook for 2 more minutes. Add leaves and water/lemon juice; cook another 3 minutes until greens are limp.

Optional: Add soy sauce and rice; cook another 2 minutes. Serve. Sprinkle with cheese. (You can melt the cheese under the broiler if you wish, but I never do.)

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as we do!

Rosemary Coley

Kale Recipe; Advice Sought For Peas

Member Heather McBride writes and provides a recipe for kale as follows: "I chop the kale into strips and place in a big pot with a kielbasa link and 2 cups or so of water. Then, simmer until the kale is as tender as you like to eat it. This also works with chopped bacon, instead of sausage, for a great side dish." Thanks, Heather! This recipe is meaty and employs what Sesame Street's Elmo might note is a "sometimes food" to add richness, but is after all life is more than just roughage. We'd love a good new vegetarian recipe for greens, which are tapering off now but will be back in earnest again in the fall. What recipes do we need right now? How about edible-podded peas such as the ones we're picking this week? Your Farmer just eats them like Nature put them on the stem. Your Editor just snaps off the stem end and pulls the string down toward the blossom end like a zipper, then steams the sugar snap peapods (peas still in them) and serves them naked. What else might we do?

Ideas from Organic Style magazine include some simple approaches. Ohio State University has more advice, not just on cooking but also preservation -- if any are left after you try the steaming and the snarfing.

Meadow In Summer

Editor's Note: When I went out to pick peas Thursday, I heard:

Tree swallows

Hermit thrush (in the woods)

Red-winged blackbird

Song sparrow

Green frog (I think - sounds like a long thick rubber band being plucked)

I hear birds, because I'm a birder. Joe, my 4-year-old son, also hears insects -- he's got a shorter horizon. Maybe you listen differently -- to small engines, to people's voices, to songs or to stories. What do you hear at the farm?

Sweet peas

Peas in Our Time

Peas will be in shares shortly, maybe as soon as this week, and certainly in the very near future.

Avoid Scratching Like a Hound

Anywhere in much of North America that there is disturbed ground and sunlight, there is likely to be the noxious native vine known as "poison ivy." Please be aware that no farm can eliminate all of this noxious weed. Many people get a serious itchy rash when they touch the leaves of this weed, so don't, if you can avoid it. If you do touch it by accident, wash the affected area with good soap right away. It's a noxious oil on the surface of the leaves that causes the unpleasant reaction, and sometimes a good wash can forestall its impact, but not always.

Slow and Steady

Please be careful driving into the farm, no matter how steady your car is. The turtles are out laying eggs, which brings them into the roads in much greater numbers than typically is the case.

Birds' life

The farm is coming alive with the natural life that benefits from diversity.

We’ve had coyotes and turkeys in the back field wandering around. The lightning bugs have come out at night, and there are a LOT of them.

Bluebirds are back living in some of the houses on neighboring property. The houses are in pairs, you may have noticed. That’s because tree swallows and bluebirds like the same kind of house, and tree swallows are more aggressive than bluebirds and will evict bluebirds if there’s only one house in a “neighborhood” to take. But once the tree swallow has a home it’s happy with, it won’t attack the bluebird. Both kinds of birds provide some natural pest control, although this is a good time to remind workers and pickers and collectors that insect repellent is always a good idea.

Here's a tree swallow flying next to a house it's inhabiting in this picture, taken by your editor Sunday (between mosquito bites). Click the pic to see it more clearly.

We would welcome any wren houses that members might have to donate or loan, as a wren house placed judiciously along the woods line would provide us with even more pest control. “As far as its feeding habits are concerned, the house wren may be considered entirely beneficial to the interests of mankind,” noted Arthur Bent in his encyclopedic study of bird life.

We could use some of that insect destruction capacity, so let us know.

Green peace

My favorite way to cook greens such as collards and kale is to destem them, chop them coarsely, and then boil them for 7 minutes in salted water. Then I rinse them in cold water to stop the cooking, and squeeze the water out.

I heat a little oil in a large non-stick pot, sauté the greens with garlic and hot red pepper, and then pour in chicken or vegetable broth, and cook for 7 more minutes. This works for all kinds of cooking greens, such as turnip greens. This recipe is called Nancy Jane Pierce's Spicy Greens, and was originally published in "From Asparagus to Zucchini: A Guide to Farm Fresh Seasonal Produce."

No Room In the Barn

We are now officially sold out of farm shares. No more are available. Thanks for all your help touting the farm to friends and fellow travelers on the road to good food, grown well.

‘Tis the season to get weeding

Luckily, it’s also the season of good weather. Don’t be caught in September with your work hours unworked and a busier post-summer schedule! Among other projects, the farm needs major weeding effort in the onion patch.

Also, the changeover to more vine-oriented crops demands other kinds of labor. We need help pounding in wooden stakes to serve tomatoes and tomatilloes. Support your local salsa!

To schedule your visit, call or email the member work coordinators Larry and Pat Bassett at 508-879-6768 or email us at padoo1-AT-rcn.com. (Please replace "-AT-" with "@" when you use this email address.)

Our Story So Far

It's Not Easy Keeping Greens

To keep collard greens as fresh as possible, one trick is to fresh-cut the bases of the stems as if they were cut flowers, and then keep them in a cool place in a bowl of cold water. This trick will work on many of the fibrous vegetables with strong “veins” that draw water up into their leaves and florets. Other examples include broccoli. As for the radishes, twist the leaves off when you get them home. Otherwise, the water in the root or radish bulb travels up into the leaf as it ordinarily would, and is wicked away through evaporation - but not replaced, as the radish obviously is no longer in the earth.

What's To Come

It’s never possible to predict what will be available for a particular pickup date, or even, for certain, a week of pickups. The farm strives to get everybody some of a vegetable in his or her share, but it doesn’t always happen in a calendar week - so what somebody gets on Sunday isn’t always exactly what the people who pick up Thursday got before them.

But we do try to make sure that if anyone in one pickup gets a given vegetable, the other pickups get that vegetable too, whether before or after. Essentially, we try to track this so each day gets equal value.

Anyway, for this week, lettuce will be coming on in a big way. Also, we have turnips coming, but we’re not sure what day that we’ll start them. We have Asian stir-fry greens coming, but might not get those this week. And we’ll have more collards. We might have more kale, but we try not to rotate that through too much. We also will have more radishes, probably, but maybe not for all three pickups. Easter Egg is name of that mix. And there might be some summer squash soon.

As for the future, with all this heat, the eggplant, tomatoes and peppers have responded really well.

Pickups have begun!

Michael Franks, distribution co-coordinator for Sundays, relocates produce under stormy skies last Sunday.