Spotlight On Greens

In the spring, any CSA, and, for that matter, any farmers market in our part of the country is inevitably dominated by greens. It works out this way due to timing. Crops in the brassica family (broccoli, cabbage, collard greens, and kale) can tolerate frost, meaning we can plant them early, but the leaf crops mature much more quickly than the slower growing crops that form a head, like cauliflower and cabbage. Then there are the asian greens and lettuce crops, which are less frost tolerant but grow quite quickly, meaning they, too, are ready to harvest before many of the other vegetables.
I often find that people are intimidated by greens. My mother is a formidable cook, but just this winter I bought a bunch of collard greens while visiting her and was surprised to find, in my farmer-bubble sort of way, that she had never cooked them and had no idea what to do with them.
In fact, greens are easy, delicious, and healthy. I have included several easy recipes for greens to give you some ideas of their possibilities. In addition to the recipes I’ve found, greens can be added to any brothy soup, right before the end, so they wilt in the heat right as the soup is done cooking. I add greens to my scrambled eggs in the morning, and used to sell kale to a coffee shop that added it to their banana-orange smoothies for a drink that was startilingly green and very delicious.
Should you tire of eating fresh greens or find yourself with an overwhelming amount, they are also easily preserved for later use.

Freezing greens: Cut up your greens and blanch them in boiling water for about two minutes. Dry lightly, put into freezer bags, press out the air, and freeze.

Lacto-fermenting greens (Gundru): Note: I tried this last year. It worked, for sure, but the greens do taste very unusual. Try this if you have an adventurous palate. According to Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation, the book in which I found this recipe, this is a traditional Nepalese ferment.
• Set greens in the sun for a few hours until they wilt.
• Using a rolling pin and a cutting board, smash and crush the greens to encourage the juices out. Do not lose the juice.
• Stuff the leaves and any juice coming out into a glass jar. Use pressure to fill the jar to capacity, forcing out more juice. Fill until jar is completely full of smashed greens covered in green juice. Screw a lid onto the jar.
• Place jar in sunny place for two to three weeks. At the end, greens should be pungent.
• You can serve them as is, or dry them on a line or spread in the sun. In Nepal, the dried gundru is used as soup stock.

Polish Sorrel Soup

Ingredients:
• ½ lb. sorrel
• 1 Tbls. Butter
• 3 Tbls. Water
• 4 cups broth
• 3-4 Tbls. Flour
• 2 cups milk
• 2 raw egg yolks
• 1 Tbls. soft butter
• salt and pepper, to taste
Chop sorrel, and add to a skillet along with 1 Tbls. Butter and 3 Tbls. water. Simmer on low heat under cover for 10 minutes.

Force mixture through a sieve into 4 cups broth and simmer a few minutes longer. Dissolve 3-4 Tbls. flour in 2 cups milk and add to the pot. Simmer briefly, then remove from heat. Fork-blend 2 raw egg yolks with 1 Tbls. soft butter, adding several tablespoons of the soup and stirring until smooth. Add back to the pot. Add salt and pepper, to taste.
(from: http://www.netcooks.com/ recipes/Soups/Zupa.Szczawiowa.(Sorrel.Soup).html)

Meet Farmer Danielle Szepi

Danielle Szepi
Apprentice

Before moving to Philadelphia, Danielle helped to run a CSA in northern California. She is very excited to be helping with the start-up of Saul CSA and to be participating in the growing local food movement in Philly. She hails originally from Wisconsin, so the cow barns at Saul bring her back to her childhood, even though she was not a dairy farmer. Danielle is interested in biking, watching movies, and drinking microbrews

Meet Farmer Megan Rulli

Megan Rulli
Apprentice

Megan comes from the railroad town of Enola on the Susquehanna River. She enjoys the company of friends and being out of doors. She comes to Philadelphia to learn more of farming, food networks, and self sufficiency. She is very talented at interpretive dance.

Meet Farmer Nicole Sugerman

Nicole Sugerman
CSA co-manager
Nicole is currently working on her fourth season as a farmer, after initially trying it out as a summer job on her school’s student run farm. Running a small CSA and learning through the “make a lot of mistakes and kill a lot of crops and then try to figure out why” school of agricultural education, she found herself unable to stop farming after that first summer; every spring, she would get this achy feeling in her chest, and she would panic slightly with the thought of missing a growing season, until she would decide to work on a farm again and the achy feeling would go away. After this happened for two more seasons, until she realized that this is what she wanted to “do” in the career sense of the word. She moved to Philadelphia a year and nine months ago, attracted in part by the city’s sizeable number of vacant lots and the possibilities this could potentially afford for urban agriculture. Besides farming and thinking about farming, she enjoys reading, cooking, bicycling, fermentation of various sorts, and trying to build things.

Meet Farmer Nina Berryman

Nina Berryman
CSA co-manager

Nina grew up in the deep woods of northern Vermont, and is one of the state's biggest fans. After going to university in Quebec for four years, she enrolled in a farming school in British Columbia for 8 months. Here the joys (and frustrations) of farming became addictive and she set out to find work in urban farming. A few google searches later, Weavers Way came onto her radar and in the spring of 2008 she moved to Philadelphia. Now she lives in a communal household in Mt. Airy and is often seen tromping around Weavers Way Co-op in mud boots and a sun hat. If she could be any vegetable it would be bulb fennel.

Stir-fried pea shoots

Ingredients
• 300g pea shoots, washed and drained
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
• 1 to 1½ tablespoons fish sauce (nampla)
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Heat oil in a non-stick wok over high heat. When hot, stir-fry garlic for about 2 minutes until fragrant. Add pea shoots and stir-fry until color changes. Add fish sauce and stir-fry over high heat briefly. Serve.
(from: http://www.asianfreerecipes.com/asian-recipes/singapore/stir-fried-pea-shoots.php)

Baby Bok Choy with Cashews

Ingredients
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 cup chopped scallions, including green ends
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 tablespoon shredded fresh ginger
• 1 pound baby bok choy, rinsed, chopped.
• 1/2 teaspoon dark sesame oil
• Soy sauce (to taste)
• Chili flakes (optional, to taste)
• 1/2 cup chopped, roasted, salted cashews

Heat olive oil in a large sauté pan on medium high heat. Add onions, and sautee for about five minutes, until slightly tender. Add garlic and ginger, sautee for 30 seconds. Add bok choy. Sprinkle with sesame oil and salt. Cover, and let the baby bok choy cook down for approximately 3 minutes. (Like spinach, when cooked, the bok choy will wilt a bit.)
Remove cover. Lower heat to low. Stir and let cook for a minute or two longer, until the bok choy is just cooked.
Gently mix in cashews.
Add soy sauce, chili flakes to taste.
(adapted from: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/baby_bok_choy_with_cashews/)

Southern Style Greens

• 1 pound collard greens
• ½ ham hock or 3 slices of cooked bacon
• ½ medium onion, sliced or chopped
• ½ teaspoon of crushed red pepper
• 1 to 2 teaspoons Kosher salt
Preparation:
Clean and wash greens well; remove tough stems and ribs. Cut them up and place in a deep pot; add onion. Wash off ham hock and add to the pot. Add red pepper and salt. Add enough water to cover greens and cook until tender, about 1 hour for collards, less for more tender greens. Taste and adjust seasonings. Serve with sliced tomato and corn bread.
Serves 4 to 6.
(adapted from: http://southernfood.about.com/od/collardgreens/r/bl00311j.htm)

Sauteed Greens

Ingredients:

· 1 bunch of greens, washed and chopped into bite-size pieces

· 1 yellow onion, sliced

· 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced or finely chopped

· 2-3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil

· Lemon juice, to taste

· 1/2 cup of vegetable broth or water

· Sea salt and pepper, to taste (optional)

Directions:

Warm olive oil over medium heat in a large pot or pan. Add onions and cook for 3-5 minutes or until slightly translucent. Be sure to stir the onions around once in a while so that they don't burn.

Add garlic and greens and mix them together with onions. Allow garlic, greens, and onions to cook for one minute, then add vegetable broth and cover pot or pan for 4-6 minutes. Check greens from time to time starting at the 4 minute mark for tenderness.

Once greens are tender, add sea salt and just a few drops of lemon juice. Give it one last stir and serve.

Be sure to taste as you add lemon juice. Adding too much can turn the whole dish sour.

(From: http://drbenkim.com/recipes-kale.htm)

The History of This CSA

Welcome to the first season of the Henry Got Crops! CSA! Although it is only mid-spring, we have been planning for and thinking about this day for a long, long, time. I feel both excitement and disbelief that the season has finally arrived.

The idea of starting a CSA first germinated (ha!) last fall, as the growing season on our original farm site, an acre-and-a-half at Awbury Arboretum in Mt. Airy, was just beginning to wind down a bit. Nina and I were both apprentices on the Weavers Way Farm, but we got along so well with the two full-time farmers that we all started talking about how we could create jobs for Nina and me to continue working with Weavers Way. So, one morning in October, we had a ‘visioning’ meeting for the farm, sitting around our picnic table, where we talked excitedly and idealistically about many ideas and dreams for our continued growth as a farm. We were most excited about one emerging idea: starting a CSA. As an organization committed to spreading the cooperative business model, a CSA fit right into Weavers Way’s goals, as a true model of a member-owned cooperative venture. We liked the idea of connecting closely to a community of people who would be consuming the crops we grew. And we knew that CSA is an important tool to helping many small farms break even financially, as it cuts out both the middleman associated with selling wholesale, and a lot of the labor costs of selling at farmers markets.

The next step, then, was identifying land on which we could grow vegetables for our CSA. We had already been working with Saul High School’s agroecology program, jointly maintaining a small hoop-house at Saul with the students. So, we wrote up a proposal to deepen our relationship by starting a CSA on some of their land. Later last fall, we spoke to the agroecology students about the project, explaining what CSA meant, showing them the land that would be used, and finally asking them if they thought this project was a good idea. The answer was a resounding “Yes”. The students liked the idea of having a hands-on learning opportunity, a concept already so important to a Saul education, and they liked the idea of converting then-unused land into a productive area of food production. They were excited about meeting the people who would be eating the vegetables. After then getting the idea approved by the adults at the school, we got right to work.

All winter, we worked on planning and outreach. We decided how much of each crop we would grow and when we would plant them. We ordered our seeds, and mapped out the plants onto our fields. We hired three amazing new apprentices to work with us this season, as well as two summertime interns. We worked with the Saul students to create a brochure about the project, and to discuss plant varieties and soil testing. Somehow, each of us got to squeeze in a couple of weeks of vacation in order to relax between one busy season and the next. In January, we started our first plants from seed in the greenhouse (onions), and we have been seeding more plants in the greenhouse every week since.

We broke ground on the farm the second week of March with the students, and planted our first crops: broccoli, kale, collard greens, cabbage, cauliflower, onions, scallions. . . It was a busy week off the bat, and the pace has not slowed down since! The agroecology classes have been out in the field with us at least once a week, prepping beds, planting crops, and composting the entire cornfield by hand (whew!). The apprentices rotate between Saul and our other sites, while Nina and I are out 5 to 6 days a week.

Even with all of our careful planning and hard work, there have been some unanticipated hurdles; a rainier-than-average spring meant it was sometimes hard to get beds prepped in time for planting, low levels of organic matter in the soil caused seeds in the ground to dry out more quickly than anticipated, and a flourishing population of groundhogs has meant a vigilant-bordering-on-obsessive watch over our fields so we do not lose any crops to the rodents. “You know,” I commented to David Zelov, the Weavers Way Farm manager, in the midst of some newly-arisen issue, “My tarot card reading a few months ago warned me that things would not go exactly as planned.” “A tarot card reading?!” He replied, “I think that’s just common sense.” It’s true that farming always has an element of the unexpected. But even despite the surprises, we are off to a terrific start. This day is the culmination of a lot of work, but also the start of a long and wonderful season. We are so excited you are with us for it!