Vegetables. Too much work?

Americans don’t eat vegetables. According to this NY Times article , we’re hardly eating more fruits and vegetables now than we were 10 years ago, and the percent of dinners at home that include a salad has actually fallen since 1994 from 22% to 17%.  This, despite a huge increase in the availability of pre-cut, pre-washed produce that you can probably get into your mouth without even having to touch it with your bare hands. Pre-prepped options abound, and yet the reason many people give for not eating more vegetables is that it’s too much work or too inconvenient.

With a brief search of the web, I found a few price comparisons of pre-prepped vs. whole produce, and while far from scientific, it appears you pay a premium of 50 to 75% for pre-cut celery or bagged salad greens. On some of these websites, you can also read user comments from people justifying their use of this convenience food because a) they’re so busy, b) they hate washing _____, or (my favorite) c) they’d never buy pre-cut carrots – that’s silly – but pre-sliced mushrooms are a necessity.

I find this whole phenomenon especially bemusing because it’s happening at the same time that farmers markets and the whole local food movement is being attacked as “elitist.”  What’s more “elite,” spending $16/pound on pre-washed, pre-cut kale, or spending $3 for a 1.5 pound bunch of kale at our stand at the farmers market, where we’ll also give you some advice on how to store, prep, and cook your kale? Oh yeah, and the kale at our stand was probably picked the same day you bought it, and will last for more than a week while you figure out what to do with it. The big difference between the two forms of kale is that you’d have to spend about 5 minutes washing and chopping up the kale from the farmers market, instead of opening the plastic tub and dumping the pre-cut leaves into a pan.

What’s going on here? How can a head of lettuce from the farmers market be both a symbol of elitism and of old-fashioned, anti-feminist household drudgery?

What are people doing all the time that makes it so inconvenient to cut up a head of lettuce for a salad? Jason and I were talking about this the other day, wondering how many hours a week people with “regular jobs” work, and whether we have more or less time to cook dinner than most people. I suspect we have less time to cook, but because it’s part of our routine, it doesn’t feel burdensome. During the growing season, our work days usually last from about 7 AM to 7 PM. If we work an afternoon farmers market, we get home around 8:30 or 9, and if we work out on the farm, we probably don’t quit until the sun sets. Then, we almost always make dinner with fresh raw vegetables.

I’m not saying we’re perfect. Plenty of nights we are too exhausted to cook and we go out for pizza or up to Poppy for the late-night naan-wiches. Also, sometimes we have cold cereal for dinner. But I think the biggest difference between us and the people who think they don’t have time to make dinner at home is that we’re in the habit of making dinner at home. For me, things that feel burdensome because they aren’t part of my routine include taking clothes to the cleaner and styling my my hair in the morning (or, for that matter, washing my hair more than once a week) .

I was inspired to write the post today after reading an article on the topic of “food elitism” by Joel Salatin. The whole article (it’s short) is here, but the main point is in this quote:

“…plenty of money already exists in our economic system to pay for good food. Can you think of anything people buy that they don’t need? Tobacco products, $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees, KFC, soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup, Disney vacations, large-screen TVs, jarred baby food? America spends more on veterinary care for pets than the entire continent of Africa spends on medical care for humans.”

I guess the reality of things is that the people have spoken, and most of them would rather work more and spend their extra money on convenience foods and new clothes. Those of us who decide to spend more time in the kitchen are forgoing the opportunity to either make more money, watch more TV, or both.

Still, the fact that hyper-expensive convenience food is considered plebeian and raw ingredients are considered elite seems contradictory. My suspicion, as I alluded to earlier, is that this logical disconnect comes from the routines we’re used to. Many of us were raised in the post-WWII convenience-everything era in which ready-made dinners, microwave ovens, and fast-food were supposed to enhance our lives by freeing us from domestic chores like cooking (in reality, this led, not to women having more free time, but enabling women to enter the workforce in larger numbers, thereby putting single-income families at an economic disadvantage but making convenience food ever more necessary). Once freed from the onerous task of having to do any prep work before turning on the oven, we filled our free hours with more work and more diversions, we forgot how to do many of the simple steps required to cook with whole foods, and ultimately, real cooking ceased to be a part of our daily routine. Now, many of the families who still cook meals from whole ingredients are those who have someone staying home because they don’t need the second income – people easily branded as elites.

So where does this leave us? I know for a fact that a family with both partners working 60-80 hours a week has the time to cook elaborate meals from whole foods and unprocessed ingredients nearly every night of the week (and honestly, it really doesn’t take that much time). More than any lack of knowledge or skills, I believe what will enable people to begin cooking again is simply for them to start cooking and to make cooking part of their routine. We are creatures of habit, and once you are in the habit of cooking, it no longer feels like a chore. And really, at least you don’t have to harvest all the vegetables before you begin cooking them.

You Should Love Radicchio

We love radicchio, and we think you should too. Radicchio, and its chicory family relatives (escarole, dandelion, frisee, etc.), all thrive in here in our temperate climate. Radicchio in particular is very cold tolerant and can be harvested fresh during the months of the year when lettuce and other leafy greens are long gone. I mean, anyone trying to prove their locavore bona fides had better get on the radicchio bandwagon because it’s something local that you can get around here throughout the winter. Also, radicchio is stunningly beautiful, and, in my opinion, delicious. However, I’m afraid these lovely vegetables are also misunderstood, under-appreciated, and somewhat feared by the general populace. This little post is intended to persuade you to eat more radicchio.

Look at it! How can you not want to love it!

On our farm, we grow six varieties of radicchio – Treviso, Castelfranco, Varieagata di Lusia, Chioggia, Pan di Zucchero, and Rosso di Verona. Add to that Puntarelle, red ribbed dandelion, frisee, and escarole and we are growing 10 varieties of bitter, sweet, delicious chicories in all.

We usually have radicchio available for harvest from about July through March, barring wintertime flooding, but its peak season is from about now (mid-September) through January. Growing in the field, the plants are pretty nondescript – they grow large, dull green outer leaves, which conceal the dense heart of the plant as it forms inside. Cold weather brings out brighter and darker colors in the leaves, and makes the plants form tighter heads.

Here is a picture of our fall crop, growing in the field in late August.Now, in the middle of September, these are just beginning to “head up”, or form the blanched inner leaves, and we will start to harvest them in mid-October.

All the varieties of radicchio that we grow originate in the Veneto region of Italy. They were originally derived from wild chicories, and were developed by a Belgian seed breeder in the mid 1800’s who named them after different towns of the region: Treviso, Castelfranco, Verona, Chioggia… This is one of our favorite parts about these beautiful plants. These small towns and hamlets in the Veneto have their own variety, bred and selected over generations, and celebrated in festivals in the fall. This is the sort of hyper-regional food love that makes Europe both wonderful and subject to a certain mockery.

OK, so you know radicchio is beautiful and cold hardy. But will you eat it? Often, people point at the stack of Treviso radicchios at the farmers market and ask what kind of lettuce it is. I say “Well, it’s radicchio, not lettuce – do you like bitter greens?” Mostly, they answer, “no.”

To us, people in Seattle should love bitter greens. I mean, as a city we certainly drink a lot of coffee, and that’s pretty bitter. “But most of us drink our coffee with milk, which balances the bitterness,” you might retort. But I’m one step ahead of you… The recipe I most commonly give to radicchio neophytes is to caramelize onions, leeks, or roast garlic and to mix that delicious allium sweetness in with the radicchio. When dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette, the sweetness balances the bitterness so well it’s like they were made for each other. Kinda like, say, coffee and cream.

Another wonderful recipe for radicchio is to grill it. I cut them through the root end, either halving or quartering the heads (depending on the size), toss in olive oil, and sear for about 90-120 seconds on a cast iron griddle. Once the cut side is browned and caramelized, I flip the head over to just wilt the other side. I usually dress them with aged balsamic vinegar and some shaved Parmesan. Paired with apples, pears, and some pine nuts or walnuts, and you can approximate the way they serve it at Boat St. Cafe.

If you are feeling timid about trying out radicchio for yourself at home, you can find it prepared tremendously well at these fine establishments: Cascina Spinasse, Sitka and Spruce, The Corson Building, Poppy, Marjorie, The Art of the Table, Sutra, Boat St. Cafe, and The Walrus & The Carpenter.

Thanks to Kimberly McKittrick for the photos of Treviso and Chioggia, both taken at the Queen Anne farmers market.

More thoughts on farmers markets

This spring and summer there have been a few articles in the local media about whether Seattle has too many farmers markets. Rebekah Denn wrote about the question in Seattle Magazine, the online P-I just posted an article last week. Back in February, King County’s agriculture department produced a whole report about the future of farmers markets in the County, which I recommend to anyone who is interested in this topic. It’s long, but very readable, and gives a much more complete picture of the challenges faced by the farmers market movement than the articles and blog posts I’ve read.

It’s true – there are a LOT of farmers markets in Seattle, at least 17 that I am aware of. This year, two new markets started up in the Olympic Sculpture Park and in the Georgetown neighborhood. Last season, the Pike Place market started operating two satellite markets, one in the Cascade neighborhood (South Lake Union) and one downtown at City Hall. On the blog for the Cascade market, the most recent post is a plea to the neighborhood to support the market so that the vendors will continue coming… not a good sign.

Are there too many farmers markets? Is this trend really a problem? I think the answer to this question depends on who you are within the farmers market system: farmer, shopper, market organizer, local food advocate… even within the group of farmers who sell at markets, the answer will probably vary. Well established growers with stall space at the most lucrative Seattle markets have a different perspective on the issue than start-up farmers who are eager for any opportunity to get their produce into a market in Seattle and have the chance to connect with shoppers and build relationships. If you are a farmers market shopper, you might be happy to find a brand new market pop up in your neighborhood, but then disappointed by the small number of vendors, or you might notice that the same farm you buy from at the Ballard market has less variety or maybe lower quality produce at a smaller, weeknight market. In any case, there’s no easy answer.

Winter Squash at the Queen Anne market

All I really know about is what we do on our farm. We attend three farmers markets a week, and over the last four years, we have participated in six different neighborhood markets and worked with three different market organizers. We’re still pretty new to the farmers market scene in Seattle, but we have built strong relationships with our customers at the Broadway and Queen Anne farmers markets over the four years we’ve been here. Farmers markets are only one part of our business model. We also have a 100 member Community Supported Agriculture program, we sell produce to about 15 of Seattle’s best restaurants, and we wholesale some of our crops to Central Co-op’s Madison Market. Each of these marketing channels has unique costs and benefits, but together, they form a business model that works well for our farm and our personal strengths and interests.

Our personal favorites - the "weird Italian vegetables"

That being said, farmers markets are by far the least economically efficient way that we sell produce. To begin with, they require a large number of hours to be spent off the farm. For each four-hour long farmers market, we spend about an hour on each end setting up and breaking down our stall, plus an additional hour on each end driving to and from the farm. That adds up to eight hours away from the farm, and we almost always have two people staffing the market, so it’s really a total of 16 hours. To make a comparable amount of money selling to restaurants or through our CSA, it takes one person about four or five hours to drive the van from the farm into Seattle and make all the deliveries. Add another hour for the return trip, and the difference between a market and a delivery day is equal to one whole day’s worth of work on the farm. Even if there wasn’t always way more work to do than time available to do it, that extra day could be spent doing all the things that non-farmers get to do: go for a hike, catch up on sleep, visit friends and family. We don’t do any of that stuff.

Setting up the stand at the Broadway farmers market

Now, even with all those counts against them, farmers market will likely continue to be an important part of our business model. They are also the most fun thing that Jason and I do every week. Farmers markets give us instant gratification. The people who love to eat our food are there, telling us how much they enjoyed the peas or the lettuce they bought last week; the random passers-by always exclaim about the color of our Rainbow chard; the other vendors are friends of ours, plus they give us bread and fruit in exchange for our extra salad greens. The advice we give every week on how to prepare and cook our produce has made a difference in the eating habits of dozens of Seattle households, and that makes me feel really, really good about what we’re doing. We’ve found a niche at our two favorite markets that is both profitable for our farm, and good for our psyches, and we want to stay there.

On the other hand, we know that average sales for farmers market vendors are on the decline, that many vendors are thinking of reducing the number of markets they attend, and that we ourselves have stopped participating in some markets because of slow sales. What makes a market a success, and is the sheer number of farmers markets in Seattle causing declining profitability for farmers?

Sorry to pick on you again, Magnolia, but I’m going to use your Saturday farmers market as an example. We came to the Magnolia market for three weeks in July. I know, that’s not a very long time. There are lots of reasons why we stopped attending this market, but the big one was that we weren’t making any money – between $350-$45o each week, even though the weather was nice, we had lots of beautiful produce, and our booth was right near the market entrance. I’ve talked to other farmers who do this market, and I hear a similar story – there just aren’t enough shoppers at the market to support the number of vendors there. I suppose this imbalance was only made worse when we started coming to the market in early July, and possibly, when we left the market, the other produce vendors started doing a little better again. The classical economist would say that this free-market system will eventually achieve some kind of equilibrium, as farmers like us decide to drop out and vendors who are profitable at the market stay on.

Of course, it doesn’t really work like that either. A small market that just has a few produce and flower farmers, a hot food vendor, and maybe some bread or cheese just might not be compelling enough to keep the neighborhood shoppers coming back each week. And without the shoppers coming back each week, eventually one or two of those vendors might decide they’d rather spend that day working on the farm than standing at a market.

But what comes first, a diverse mix of vendors selling high quality produce, or a supportive, food-loving neighborhood that spends enough money each week to keep the market thriving? Does there have to be some kind of magic synchronicity, where a neighborhood is primed to support a market just at the same time that a number of new or expanding farms is ready to join a market? A good market manager who understands the neighborhood and anticipates the ebb or flow of the shopper demographic is also absolutely critical. My example for this is Molly Burke at Broadway, who has carefully nurtured the growth of the market over the last four years and deftly matched the number of vendors to the growing number of shoppers.

Then there are the millions of intangible reasons why a market is successful. When we first started at the Broadway market, it was our least successful market. After each of our first two seasons, we strongly considered dropping out of the market and trying to find some other Sunday or Saturday market to take its place. Why did we stick with it? For one, it’s in our neighborhood. Jason and I live just a few blocks away, and we wanted to support “our” market in hopes that it would eventually get better. Also, our buddy Brent Olsen, who sells meat and potatoes at Broadway (and several other markets), kept telling us that he had a good feeling about Broadway, that he’d been there since it opened, and he thought the market was about to turn a corner.

Hordes of vegetable lovers at the Broadway market

From the shopper’s side, what makes a market compelling? With so many markets to choose from, what draws someone back to the market each week – and more importantly, what makes that person buy enough food to keep us all in business? My example for this is the Queen Anne farmers market. This market almost disappeared after its first two years when the original market manager decided there wasn’t enough neighborhood support for a Thursday market. A group of neighbors rallied together and worked extremely hard to keep the market alive, and have been operating as an independent market now for almost two seasons. The market moved to a much more visible location, has gradually added new vendors, and puts on the best chef demos and events in the whole city. As a vendor, I can tell that there is a solid group of neighbors in Queen Anne that is dedicated to making this market succeed, and a high percentage of our customers each week are die-hard regulars. The farmers market is clearly an important weekly event for a lot of Queen Anne residents. They come to the market to see their neighbors, hear the musicians, get ice cream with their kids, drink a glass of wine at Pasta & Co., but it’s not just a social event. They also know that if they don’t support the farmers at the market, the market won’t thrive, and all those intangibles will be at risk. They’re making a conscious choice to spend their food dollars with us at the Queen Anne market instead of at the grocery store, or even at another of the nearby farmers markets.

So, what is the secret to a farmers market’s success, and how do we know whether Seattle’s 17 weekly farmers markets are too many? Here’s one way to look at the second part of the question: King County’s farmers market report shows that farmers need to make at least $600 per day at a market for it to be worth their time. I’d say that seems a little low, but let’s use it in this example. If a typical market has 30 farmers, then the total dollars needed each week to support the market’s farmers would be $18,000. According to the Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance, the average number of shoppers at their markets ranged, in 2009, from about 800 per day at Magnolia to 2,500 per day at the University District. The Phinney market, where we sell on Fridays, averaged about 1,000 and Broadway averaged over 1,300. Let’s assume an average daily shopper attendance of 1000, just to make it easy. That would mean that each shopper at the market would have to spend about $15 each week to make it worth the farmers’ time to be at the market. For that to happen at all 17 markets, we’d need 17,000 Seattleites to spend $18/week (just during the market season, not year round). Or, we’d need 34,000 people to spend just $9/week. There are over 600,000 people in Seattle. I think we can probably support more farmers and farmers markets.

Of course, there are many other issues that affect farmers markets and farmer success. When the average American family only spends $26 per week per person on food that they cook at home, spending $18 at the farmers market might seem like a lot. On the other hand, the USDA tells us that we should be spending about 40% of our food budget on fruits and vegetables (it’s in this report, for those of you who love statistics).  If the average family of 2.5 spends that 40% at the farmers market, that would be $26 per household each week. At our stand, $20 buys a pretty hefty bag of vegetables.

Other barriers to farmers market success include (in)convenience, competition from cheap, subsidized commodity foods available at the supermarket, misperceptions about price and value of farmers market produce, and the fact that most of us don’t know how to cook. We’re working on all these problems. Give us a few more years, and we’ll see what we can do.

Picking lettuce... one head at a time.

Leaving Magnolia Farmers Market

After spending three weeks as a vendor at the Saturday Magnolia Farmers Market, we’ve decided to drop out. Our crew is stretched thin already this summer, and I’ve been hobbled in various ways and unable to help with farm work. Besides going to the market on Saturday, we also have our biggest harvest of the week. We pick vegetables all day Saturday to bring to the Broadway Sunday Farmers Market, where every week we bring more and more produce and manage to sell almost all of it. The difference between these two markets is striking. I’ve been doing the Saturday Magnolia market by myself, in order to leave more hands on the farm to harvest for Sunday, and I’ve had lots of time each Saturday market to observe the people come and go (and not buy many of our vegetables) and I’ve been wondering what makes a market either thrive or  languish.

When we started at the Broadway Sunday market, back in 2007, it was the worst of the three markets we attended, even though it was the only weekend market for us, which usually would mean more people and higher sales. At that time, we were a three person farm operation, plus two unpaid spouses, and were all seriously overworked and under-slept. We often entertained the idea of dropping out of the Broadway market, but we had enough good sales days here and there that we decided to try it again the following year. Staying with the Broadway market was one of the best decisions we every made because this market has grown by leaps and bounds. The number of vendors has grown to fill the parking lot where the market is held, and the neighborhood comes out in force every Sunday, even when it’s raining, to stock up on groceries for the week.

What makes the difference between these two markets? Having only been at the Magnolia market for three weeks, I’m no expert on the habits of this neighborhood, but here are a couple things I’ve noticed. Most of the shoppers at Broadway come on foot. I imagine lots of these folks don’t have cars, and/or are used to doing their errands on foot. That way, when it’s super hot or raining, they come to the market anyway, because they have to leave the house on foot in order to buy their groceries whether they are going to the QFC down the street or to the farmers market. At Magnolia, each week quite a few people told me that they’d love to buy our beautiful lettuce, but that it would have to sit in a hot car for a few hours before they got home, so they took a pass. I also saw lots of people come in from across the park or down the street who must have walked from home, but at Broadway I think the percentage of walkers is much higher.

Another theory (very unscientific), is that there are more families with kids in Magnolia than in Capitol Hill (although I do see lots of babies and pregnant women on the Hill these days). Our farm grows lots of unusual vegetables, and many of our customers at Capitol Hill get very excited when the first purslane or puntarelle comes in each year because they like to try new things and don’t mind experimenting with vegetables that they might end up not liking that much. Adults without kids at home have more time and more flexibility to cook with new and different things. I saw lots of families at Magnolia picking up flats of berries and bunches of carrots – maybe our produce isn’t kid-friendly enough.

Whatever the reason(s), we ultimately concluded that we simply can’t afford to spend 8 hours on a Saturday at a market where we might not make more than $400. Besides the time spent driving, setting up, and standing at the market, we also will save the time spent harvesting for the market, probably about 10-15 hours every Friday. At this time of year, when everyone’s been working full bore for three months, a little break can go a long way.

For the Magnolia shoppers who I got the chance to talk to over the last few weeks, I’ll be sorry to miss you. I hope you’ll come visit us at the Queen Anne market on Thursdays, and tell your friends and neighbors to get down to the market on Saturday and buy some vegetables (and cheese, and fruit, and bread, and flowers)! The market needs your support as much as you need the food you buy there.

weird vegetables, recipes, and a book

Today we attended the Magnolia neighborhood farmers market for the first time ever. For the last three years, we have been vending at the same three markets each week, and got to know each neighborhood’s general preferences (the Central District likes kale all year ’round, Queen Anne loves lettuce), and the regular shoppers. The regular shoppers have also gotten to know us, as well as the many weird and unfamiliar vegetables that we grow. For the first season or so, we worked hard to introduce people to some of our unusual crops, such as purslane, radicchio, and spigariello. We also grow some uncommon varieties of common vegetables, like  Shunkyo radishes, and Speckled Amish butter lettuce. Jason and I sometimes joke that we’ve given out our standard recipe for baby white turnips hundreds of times – but we’ve also made scores of people into devotees of the turnip – people who are sad when they come to the market and we don’t have turnips.

Now that we’ve been at the same markets for a few years, we spend a lot less time at each market explaining what things are and how to cook them. However, starting out at a new market today reminded me that there are still lots of people in Seattle who don’t know about purslane, Shunkyo radishes, and bronze romaine lettuce. It’s fun to sell someone a vegetable they have never tried before, or maybe never even heard of. One of the most rewarding farmers market experiences is when a customer comes back the next week and says “I did what you told me, and roasted the sprouting broccoli, and it was so good! What should I make this week?” I love to think that we’re helping people become more adventurous and confident cooks, and that we’re helping make some under-appreciated and delicious vegetables more well-known. On the other hand, it’s sort of tough to stand at the market and answer questions and give advice for four hours and not actually sell very many vegetables. That’s what today was like. But, we’ve done this before, and have more to share than when we were first starting out. I was glad to see so many people stop and ask about our produce, and I expect some of them will be back to buy more next week.

Recipes

No matter how beautiful our rainbow chard or radicchio looks, people, having bought it, have to take it home and decide what (if anything) to do with it. Home cooking is the final frontier of the movement to re-localize the food economy and change America’s eating habits. Jason and I have a slew of simple recipes – actually, more like preparation guidelines – for almost everything we grow. Grilled romaine lettuce, braised radishes with radish greens, butter-steamed pea vines,  roasted broccoli (or roasted anything), radicchio salad with caramelized onion, beet “ceviche”. We want to send people home with the ability to take the vegetable they bought and two or three other staple ingredients, and cook something delicious in just a few steps. I love the cooking demonstrations at the farmers market (especially when we get free samples), but they often require a bunch of other specialty ingredients, measured quantities, and a printed recipe with all the instructions.

Summer vegetable salad on the farm

Nathan cooking up some turnips and radishes

We have a Recipes page on this blog where we have started to collect some of our standby market cooking ideas. Check it out – and we’d love to hear some of your easy peas-y vegetable recipes.

Book Recommendation

A customer at the Magnolia farmers market asked me what to look for in choosing good radishes. I explained how radishes can to change from just perfect to stringy and inedible in only a few days, because they bolt (make a flowering stalk) very quickly in summer weather. I showed her how our Shunkyo radishes still were forming tiny new leaves at the crown of the radish root, and that a bad radish will have a tough stalk there instead. She had lots of questions about how to choose the best produce at a market, and wondered where I had learned everything… I told her I spend a lot of time with vegetables. However, I do have an excellent vegetable reference guide to recommend, Elizabeth Schneider’s “Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini.” It’s a beautiful, extensive, and well-illustrated guide to most of the vegetables you will find at farmers markets in the US. It has several shortcomings: it’s expensive, it excludes some quotidian vegetables such as tomatoes, and, I think most importantly, it’s based on the experience of an East coast market-goer, so some of the information she provides doesn’t necessarily hold true for our area.

Nonetheless, I recommend seeking it out at a bookstore or library. If nothing else, the photographs of vegetables are worth an extensive perusal.

Let’s all cook and eat more vegetables!

High school volunteers from Global Visionaries cooking lunch on the farm

pretty pictures

Our friend and farm intern, Ann Pelo, has been taking some absolutely beautiful photos of plants and people on the farm this season. I wanted to write a new post today, and as usual I’m kicking myself for not taking more photos of the farm to help illustrate the blog. So instead, I’m just going to borrow some of Ann’s photos and also tell you to pay a visit to her blog to see more.

I tend to take most of my photographs of vegetables at the farmers market, like this:

Fennel and Treviso radicchio from last fall

But Treviso radicchio growing in the field is also lovely:

Rainbow chard in the field is nice and all:

But bunches of chard at the farmers market are better:

Here are some of Ann’s photos of the vegetables we’ve been growing this spring/early summer:

our sweetest lettuce, Bronze Romaine

Purple Kohlrabi

Turnips and radishes

Enjoy your vegetables!

Farmers markets, vegetable shortage, and fringe benefits

So, if you’ve been following our blog this spring/summer, you know that we’ve had a tough season so far. Extraordinarily wet weather, temperatures far below average, and unexpected life events have combined to make a very slow start to the harvest season. Harvest dates for most of our crops are running three to four weeks behind normal. Also, slug damage on newly planted seedlings was much worse than normal, so we lost significant percentages of some of our turnip, lettuce, and kale plantings.

One of the big positive developments this season was an amazing amount of interest in our Community Supported Agriculture program. After keeping the number of members around 70 for the last three years, last year’s bountiful harvest convinced us that we could grow to 100 members. We started taking sign ups in February, and were nearly full by the end of April. Then came the usual flurry of people who we can’t say no to, asking if there was still space for them in the CSA. We couldn’t say no. Now we have 115 members, and barely enough vegetables to fill the boxes each week. We are, of course, gratified and thankful that we have such a supportive community for our farm. We rely on the money that spring CSA pre-payment money to buy seeds and fuel for the tractors, pay our insurance bills, hire our interns – bridging the six month income gap from November to May. That’s when the farm looks like this:

So, what does this have to do with farmers markets? Well, since our lovely CSA members give us that money in the spring, when we need it most, they are first in line for vegetables when the CSA season begins in early June. We keep a careful eye on beds of growing spinach, radishes, and baby bok choi all through May, hoping they will be ready to harvest for the first few weeks of the CSA. We refrain from harvesting burgeoning beds of Rainbow chard, kale, and kohlrabi, knowing we need them to yield 115 bunches all on the same day. As a result of this hoarding, we have less to offer our restaurant and farmers market customers, and that makes us sad.  Regular market shoppers and restaurant chefs ask us every week “where are the little white turnips?” and “when will you have snow peas?” For the first four weeks of farmers markets this spring, we sold out of everything we brought with an hour or more left to go. One the one hand, it’s nice to know that everything we have struggled to grow this spring has found an appreciative home, and we have very little waste – on the other hand, it’s hard to have to tell our loyal restaurant and market customers that we picked everything we could, and it’s already gone when they get to the market at 6.

All gone in three hours

Of course, there’s some sort of positive side to this problem too. Often, the farmers markets are so busy that all we do is make change and weigh salad greens. This season, we’ve had the time to slow down and talk to people – and that might actually be the best part about the markets. Jason and I both grew up here in Seattle, both went to college and graduate school here, and our parents are also lifelong Seattle residents (hence the name of our farm – we’re no poseurs when it comes to being local). Working at the farmers markets, we see a LOT of people we know. At Queen Anne on Thursdays, I often see my college English professor, my cousin and his young daughter on their way to swimming lessons, an acquaintance from the neighborhood where I grew up, friends from high school, friends from high school’s parents, parents’ friends, parents’ friends’ friends. At the Broadway market on Sundays there are even more familiar faces, because this is the neighborhood where we have lived for the last ten years. We see my sister, my parents, checkers from the Madison Market co-op, the folks who make coffee at the Joe Bar, Jason’s law school classmates, and the parents of a friend I met in second grade.

Besides all these people, there are many wonderful and loyal regular customers who we’ve made friends with over the last few years working at the markets. Jason and I have been so welcomed by the Queen Anne neighborhood community that we now feel like it’s “our” neighborhood too (although it will never replace Capitol Hill). When we leave the market on Thursday evening or Sunday afternoon, I invariably feel like I love these people and these community we are part of. Even when we run out of food early, and we’ve just worked a twelve hour day, and we’re going home to a pile of dirty dishes and a late dinner, the support and friendship we find at the farmer market reminds me how much I love being a farmer.

And someday soon, I hope our stand at the market looks like this:

A Brief Musical Interlude

Sometimes we like to stop working and have a little fun. Over the past two summers, we’ve had a number of our favorite Seattle restaurant cooks come out to the farm and cook fantastic dinners. Last night, Marie Rutherford and Bobby Palmquist from the Boat Street Café cooked up some delicious and lovely food for a summer solstice feast.

Our friend Michael Getz set a beautiful table, complete with homemade paper lanterns. The clouds threatened, but it did not rain. There was even a band! Thanks to everyone who came out, and especially to everyone who helped cook, serve, play music, and make it a great evening.

Weather – eternal spring?

When our first interns arrived on the farm this year, in early April, we promised them that Seattle would eventually have a beautiful summer. We promised them this again in May, when we said “we normally have a pretty nice May, but then June will be kind of rainy, and then after the Fourth of July, it will be mostly warm and sunny”. May, unfortunately, was not so nice and June has been pretty cold and wet as well. Now, when I look at the weather forecast and it shows four days of sun, starting in two days, I just laugh and tell the interns that I’ll believe it when I see it. Our friendly local meteorologist, Cliff Mass, tells us we have set a new record for the latest date to break 75°.

Elsewhere on his blog, however, he claims that spring in the Pacific Northwest is pretty much always this bad, and that we all just forget about it once summer comes. I beg to differ. This is our fourth spring farming out here in the Snoqualmie Valley, and I know exactly how much worse this spring is than normal. As Farmer Dan likes to point out, before he bought the property, the dairy farmers would plant the entire 50+ acres to corn every year all at once – the limiting factor would have been the state of the  lowest ground, and once it was dry enough to plow, “Bam. They’d plant the whole field in one day.” Right now, one day before the summer solstice, we still have a veritable lake covering about 1/2 acre of our main field. No way that dairy farmer would be planting corn yet. Last year, we had crops in this part of the field by mid-May.

When people ask about the challenges of farming and dealing with the weather, I always say how great it is to be a diversified vegetable farmer. No matter what sort of season we get, there is some crop that will thrive. 2010 looks like it’s going to be a great year for lettuce, Swiss chard, and cabbage….

If you’ve read all the way to the end here, past the pretty pictures, perhaps you would also like to visit another blog or two? Two new blogs have recently been added to our blog-roll. Everett is a member of our award-winning 2009 intern crew, and a very talented and funny comic artist – you can see his work here. Rachel is one of these amazing people who just likes to come work on the farm every week in exchange for vegetables, and she also makes exceptionally good vegan pastries. You can find her at My Munchable Musings.

That’s all for this time. Check in each week to see the progress of this exciting season. Will the sun ever return? Will the field dry out in time for our heroes to plant their beets and carrots? Or will spring drag on into fall without ever becoming summer? Find out here at the Local Roots Farm Blog.

More Farm News

I began writing an essay this morning about farmers markets, and transparency, and blah, blah, blah, zzzzzzzzzz. Too many words and not enough time to get rid of them. As Mark Twain once said, “If I had had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” So I’ve put that bit of logorrhea on the back burner and instead will regale you with some farm news.

The first thing I’d like to report is that our former farming partners Larry and Michelle Lesher are doing phenomenally well, running a small farm of their own in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and blogging about it here. We could not be more excited for them.

The biggest piece of news this week is that our CSA, after much weather related stress and worry, has finally started. Somehow, we have 115 members this year – only 15% more than the absolute, no-way-we-can-do-that-many-people limit we set for ourselves. Sometimes, it’s really hard to say no to people. Our first week went well, considering the dearth of vegetables we have right now. In the box last week, we put two heads of romaine lettuce, a half-pound bag of salad mix, a bunch of cilantro, a bunch of spinach, and 3/4 lbs of the most amazingly delicious spring leeks ever. The improving forecast is alleviating, somewhat, the ongoing pressure of ensuring 115 bunches and heads of so many items each week.

Beyond the CSA, we finally have some good weed killing weather, and the beds badly need it. Onions are the crop that’s always the most difficult to keep weed-free. They are transplanted earlier than anything else, and they spend the first few months of their life growing very slowly during a time of the year when weeds grow quickly and are hard to kill, because the soil is so damp. This Saturday, after the harvest was finished, I decided to try using our little walk-behind tractor to till the walk aisles of our onion beds. Ordinarily, walk paths are less important to keep weed free, but the grasses and buttercup had so long to get established they had begun sending runners in amongst the onions.

So there I was, tilling away when the tiller suddenly leapt from the earth, pulling me with, all superman-like horizontal with the earth, it right into the onions I was trying to save. Intern Paul estimated that the wheels of the BCS tractor and I were 3 feet off the ground. I came away with a pretty bad cut/bruise on my leg when I crashed into the BCS and I killed a few dozen onion seedlings, but we’re otherwise ok. Thanks for asking. How did this happen? Well, the tines of the tiller spin 16 times faster than the wheels… when the force the tines generate overpower the friction of the tractor weight on the ground, it can lurch forward unexpectedly. In this case, it did so in a very dramatic fashion. Yikes.

In more upbeat, less dangerous news, we have begun spraying microbes on our plants…. seriously. Ok, so one of the most misguided questions we get at the farmers market is, “do you spray?” I’ve always answered, no, because we’ve never sprayed anything on anything. But we have also always intended to start foliar feeding our plants. This year, I can now use the Socratic method to answer the spray question, “spray what?” After reading the book Teaming with Microbes (pun!) we were inspired to buy a compost tea brewer and start raising our own little beneficial biota. So Saturday evening, after brewing the tea for 24 hours, we diluted it with water and started spraying it on our little plants. The potatoes got it first, as they are about to flower and that’s the best time to feed potatoes. The tomatoes got it next, and the brassicas are next after that.

And that’s all the farm news to report.