Thursday of this week is the first day of spring! 12 hours of sunlight, halfway between the shortest and longest days of the year. Everything is very green, and very soon, our spring flower field will be an explosion of color.
To me, it always feels like a very optimistic and hopeful time of year; lots of future food all around us and a lot of “newness.” Packets of seeds for all types of delicious summer produce keep arriving and soon will be planted in a field or in the greenhouse.
Fruit trees are in bloom; the apricot trees covered with delicate flowers will be ready for harvest in three months, as long as we don’t have a bad frost.
Green fields of cover crop will become food for sheep and soil microorganisms.
Transplants are getting noticeably bigger by the day.
This particular window of time is rich in dreams of future harvests, but is rather lean when it comes to items to harvest now. We’re in a gap between the crops that were seeded in fall and those seeded in winter, one of the “shoulder seasons” we experience during the course of the year.
Many of the crops planted in fall are gone. Most crops that you harvest once (like lettuce and cauliflower) have long been harvested. For the crops that we revisit multiple times (like kale, broccoli, and collards), most have started to flower, a natural response to the increase in daylight. We’ve still got some greens around, but the rest have been mowed and those fields will soon be prepped for planting something else, either a cover crop or another food crop. The seeds and transplants put in the soil in winter have grown slowly in the cold and wet conditions but will be here soon. It means CSA boxes are not quite as exciting as other times of year, and the farmers market stands look a little less diverse, though they still display an impressive rainbow of produce and items from our Kitchen.
Some of you may be like me and never get tired of carrots (which are SO sweet this time of year) and love root vegetables. For those who are a little less enamored with them, never fear – new, exciting things are coming soon! We’ve got lots of alliums (including green garlic and spring onions!), we should have radishes and new salad greens in the next few weeks, and asparagus too! Via your box, you’ll get to experience the pops of spring newness that let all of us know that spring is here.
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
