Water

I grew up in Seattle, where water was a way of life. It surrounded the city and fell from the sky. We mostly ignored it, unless we were actively trying discourage people from moving to the area. Then we exaggerated it. But even when the clouds cleared, it was the view of frozen water on the mountains that took our breath away.

It wasn’t until I began farming that water became a matter of survival. My first garden was two acres of vegetable in the high desert along the California and Nevada. There, we didn’t wait for water, we just pumped it furiously from the aquifer below our valley. It rained three times in the two years I was there.

My first summer in the Midwest I worked on the Potato Breeding Station in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. I quickly became the head irrigator, maintaining miles of four-inch aluminum pipe in twenty foot lengths, getting up at two in the morning to turn on the traveling irrigation gun. The following year, 1993, I signed on at Harmony Valley Farm in Wisconsin, a large organic vegetable farm. I started with an extra fifty cents an hour wage to account for my irrigation experience. It rained the entire summer. The Mississippi flooded. My boss threatened to garnish my wages if I didn’t stop doing such a good job of keeping things wet.

Our first year at Rock Spring Farm, after hand-watering some 2000 transplants, Kim and I ordered an irrigation system. The day it arrived we received three inches of rain. A week later we received another three inches, the beaver dam washed away, and our fields stood under water. A neighbor stopped by to ask me to turn it off.

As members of the farming community, we do have a certain obligation to complain about the weather. After all, it’s always too hot except when it’s too cold, and it’s always too dry, except when it’s raining. But this spring, such as it is, has certainly given us some cause for complaining. We’ve never been in the field this late – it’s May, for goodness sake, and we still haven’t been able to till in the fields! – but we know that spring will come sooner or later.

In Kim's Kitchen

This week’s Overwintered Spinach was planted last fall, around September 1. Over the years, we have found this to be a pretty reliable crop, although we lost it last year. You may want to chop some of the larger leaves, and ignore the yellow tips; at this time of year, the nitrogen in the soil is relativcly unavailable to plants because of the cold soil temperatures, so the spinach has a difficult time fully greening up.

Spinach-Cheese Calzone

1 batch pizza dough (using about 3 cups flour)
8 oz fresh spinach
4 oz mushrooms, sliced or chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup shredded mozzarella

Preheat the oven to 450, and lightly oil a cookie sheet. Prepare pizza dough, and divide into six equal parts. Stretch these into rounds like you would for a pizza, each between 6 and 9 inches. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a skillet, add the garlic and the mushrooms and sauté until the mushrooms soften. Add the spinach and wilt slightly. Remove from heat. Spoon equal portions of the mixture onto one side of each round, sprinkle with cheese, fold the dough over and pinch to seal. Poke a few holes with a fork to let the steam escape. Repeat until you are out of rounds. Brush each calzone with a bit of oil, and bake for about 15 minutes until the crust is golden. We sometimes like to serve this with a side of tomato sauce for dipping.

A mainstay of the spring garden, and the first herb to green up in the spring, Chives have a delicious, mild onion flavor.

It’s been a cold spring, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. Lentils always seem like a warming food to us, and the chives in this recipe provide just enough of a hint of spring for this not to seem like a heavy, winter dish.

Lentil Salad with a Spring Twist

2 cups lentils (we like the little French green ones)
¼ cup lime or lemon juice
½ cup olive oil
4 Tbsp chopped chives
Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the lentils in enough water to cover until al dente, about ten minutes. Drain and set aside to cool a bit. Meanwhile, whisk together the remaining ingredients. Toss with the cooled lentils and serve.

Some gardeners refer to Red Russian Kale as a “Salad Kale” for its extra-tender leaves. It’s really nothing at all like the hardy kale of late fall and early winter. When this crop gets a little bigger, we enjoy the greens cooked as you would spinach; when small and tender, we really really enjoy it sliced into ribbons for a salad.

Vase-like Bok Choi is one of the prettiest plants in the spring greenhouse. A Chinese cabbage, Bok Choi is thought to be the oldest of all the Asian greens. It has a mild flavor, and the stalks have a crunch like celery. We enjoy serving the leaves and spoon-shaped stalks together as a scoop for any sort of vegetable dip.

May 17—28 is Be Nice to Nettles Week in the UK, so we are a little early here but the time is right to take advantage of this delicious spring treat. Like asparagus, nettles are a true product of spring. They can sting, so be careful handling them; you may want to wear gloves. We know three ways to get rid of the sting: swish vigorously in cold water; boil; or chop very finely. Grasping them firmly and without fear also works, but it is not for the faint of heart. All of these will burst the oil glands that contain the stinging formic acid. Nutritionally the nettle is an excellent source of calcium, magnesium, iron and numerous trace elements as well as a range of vitamins. The young shoots can be used in soups and stews and in place of spinach, or along side it to provide a bright, very “spring” flavor. Even our Norwegian farmer neighbors delight in this spring treat!

Nettle Omelets

For four medium omelets
8 eggs, whisked together
6 oz. Nettles
2 tablespoons chopped garlic or chives
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Oil
Salt and pepper

Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil. Using tongs or wearing gloves plunge the nettles into a bowl of cold water and swish. Drop the nettles into the boiling water for two minutes. Drain and chop, leaving out any large stems. Sauté the nettles in oil for about 2 minutes. Turn off heat and add garlic, salt and pepper to taste. Prepare omelet in your favorite way, adding 1/4 of the nettle mix and 1/4 of the cheese to each omelet.

The Carrots, Beets, and Onions in this week’s box all remain from last year’s harvest; we save a few to help us get started in the spring. Don’t try to store these too long; the onions, especially, are ready to start their spring round of growth if they get too warm.

Farm Happenings

Weather: OMG

Heard Recently: “It’s raining, it’s snowing, there’s no corn growing….” It did snow here on Monday. The sun came out on Tuesday, after a long hiatus.

Worthy of Note: From Wendell Berry: “Don’t pray for the rain to stop. Pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.”

Activities on the Farm: The greenhouses are chock full of stuff. We are holding a whole bunch of plants outside until the ground dries out. Cleaning and prepping equipment continues apace. The tomatoes went into the unheated greenhouses just ahead of last week’s cold snap, but they seem to be doing fine. We repaired most of the barn doors, many of which have spent way too much time flapping in the wind. The Singing Hammers crew also widened the doors to the upstairs of the barn where we park the tractors, so that we can now park every tractor we own in the barn (if you had told me twenty years ago that I would ever say something like, “every tractor we own,” I would have said you were crazy.).