June 21

New potatoes: dug up while still immature, which is why the skins are SO FRAGILE. 

Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, which is nearly too fragile even for one day of transport. But it tastes so lettucey. 

This week's harvest:

NEW: new potatoes! These are really truly baby, immature, potatoes, not just small ones. (Also some very small ones!) I had trouble washing them: the skins come off really easily.  Smitten Kitchen has a recipe for a spring veg salad including both new potatoes and snap/snow peas. If you put greens with their stems in instead of asparagus, this week's bag covers the fresh ingredients pretty well.

First carrot! This variety is called Coral, quick and sweet. Plenty of seedlings of bigger varieties finally popping up, including the Purple Dragons that were so good last year. 

And one lettuce that is a quixotic challenge for me: the ruffly light green one is Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, a classic backyard variety that has NONE of the structural traits that makes lettuce manageable to ship. Even the quick, short shipping we're doing. But it's still used as the "lettuce flavor" standard in some variety descriptions, and I think it's delicious.

Ongoing: Red Mist lettuce, chard, Vivid pak choi, kale/mustard braising mix, turnip, radishes, scallions.

"Vivid" pak choi, rainbow chard, the edge of a pile of kale/mustard braising mix, and sheaves of root veg. 

More of the sheaves.  It's the most space-saving way I've found to sort everything.

You can also see the top of the compost container. Some lightly damaged veg go home as "farmer food" but anything that isn't in good enough condition to refrigerate had better be taken off at this stage. It all goes into a big common compost heap, turned by tractor, and mostly used on the student farm at Viva. 

Storage notes:

The Black Seeded Simpson is the shortest-lived of this weeks greens. The rest of the greens should be good for a week. The root veg last longer if you take the tops off; all the tops are edible but a bit tougher than other greens. 


Recipe suggestions:

Serious Eats, ways to fancy up your snap peas. 

As above, Smitten Kitchen spring veg salad including both new potatoes and snap/snow peas. 


Getting ripe for next week:

Cilantro. Mayyyybe basil but probably not quite. Heart-of-romaine lettuce, some other lettuces. Big red kale.