Veggie of the Week:

Salad Turnip or Hakurei Turnip 

These beautiful white turnips are a Japanese turnip. They are crisp, juicy, and sweet with a mild spicy radish-like bite to them. These turnips sport a soft skin and don't need to be peeled or even cooked. They can be enjoyed raw or cooked. Looking for a light snack? Try cutting thin slices of turnip, arrange the slices over a slice of buttered bread, sprinkle a little sea salt, and voila! Theses tender turnips can be added to salads, or sautéed in a stirfry. The leaves are edible as well, but will become limp if they remain attached to the turnip during storage. To store your salad turnips and greens first separate the greens. The turnips can be stored in your refrigerator without tops. Wash the greens in a bowl of cold water, this will allow any grit to settle to the bottom of the bowl. Remove your greens and shake off any excess water, wrap them in a dish towel and store in a plastic bag in the refrigerator. The towel will absorb any extra water and keep the greens moist, but not soggy. Try this recipe from share member Kathy D'Addario:

 

Spring Turnips with their greens 

Ingredients:

12 or more spring turnips scrubbed, greens washed and trimmed

Salt and freshly milled pepper

2-4 Tbsp of butter

Several thyme or lemon thyme sprigs, leaves plucked

Directions:

Peel only if turnips are not small and tender

Boil 3 quarts of water for the greens... add 1 ½ tsp salt and greens, simmer for 8-10 minutes until tender

Steam turnips in a steaming basket (with salted water) until they are tender/firm, about 10-12 minutes

Remove and drain greens... squeeze excess moisture out with back of a spoon toss with half of the butter and season with salt and pepper

Arrange greens on a plate

Toss turnips with the remaining butter, a few pinches of salt, pepper and thyme. Pile turnips on the greens and serve.

One of the Strangest Springs Ever

by Farmer Andy

This past spring, particularly the period between late April and early June, will go down as one of the most unusual I've ever experienced. It definitely makes me think there is some kind of climate changing weirdness going on these days as I cannot ever remember anything quite this severe in its strangeness.

March and April seemed to start out relatively normal. We usually do our first direct seeding during the last week in March. That was pushed back just by a week or so because the ground was too wet. But, our successive seedings went without a hitch through April and we were able to accomplish a reasonable amount of field work.

Then in late April it began to rain. We had one perfectly dry sunny strech of several days in early May, but aside from that it rained until about the 25th of May. And rained, and rained, and rained. Temperatures stayed right around 65 to 70 degrees during the day, 50s at night and everything stayed wet.

Now this complicates matters for us for two reasons: we do about 40% of our planting for the entire year in May and plants need sunshine to grow.

Then the strangeness changed course and the temperatures shot up to the mid 80s and eventually upper 90s and it dried out. All in a matter of a week or two.

Most vegetable plants dont like this sort of thing. After several weeks of the May sogginess we were losing crops to mold, some of which (arugula, mizuna, cucumbers) I've never seen affected by mold. Most of the crops in the ground at that time, in fact, were somewhat affected by the mold. I would estimate the losses to mold at less than 10%.

The cool wet overcast conditions also affected most of the plants' ability to grow. And with the ensuing heat, many crops were stressed to the point that they "bolted" i.e. going to flower and becoming inedible. Bolting often occurs before the plant can grow out to its optimal size. We lost at least 20% of our broccoli crop as many plants bolted in the heat while the plants were very small, resulting in a broccoli head the size of an M & M rather than a grapefruit.

While the mold is gone now, its still too soon to tell how the dramatic weather change will fully affect some of the other crops. Hopefully, they'll be able to pull through with this more reasonable weather we've been enjoying lately. In any event, we have more notable memories to file away which might help in devising strategies to deal with these farming conundrums in coming years.