A warmer day (and vegetable musings)

Finally, the last bit of accumulated ice has melted and it was a "normal" temperature day, with highs ~ 58°F.

I'm itching to plant cool-season greens - I've missed having homegrown greens (kale, collards, mustard, etc.) over the last two winters, even though I've felt we've eaten nothing but homegrown greens in years past.

So, we're enjoying broccoli, collards, red cabbage, and kale from the grocery store -- cooked with garlic, red onions, and a bit of balsamic vinegar -- they're quite nice.

But a restaurant meal out at a local Mexican place yesterday evening was telling -- the "vegetables" were shredded carrots, broccoli bits, and some onions, clearly from a regional veggie warehouse somewhere, and delivered through the commercial food system.  They all tasted the same.

Geez, I sound like a total food snob, but homegrown veggies are really good. Vegetables from local markets, ditto.

Freshly-harvested vegetables, even if industrial, quickly frozen, are good, too, as are their organic equivalents.

I don't like to buy fruits and vegetables with a super long distance pedigree, so certainly "fresh" fruits and vegetables from the Southern Hemisphere this time of year are not normally in my cart  (berries, peaches and nectarines, grapes, asparagus, and the like).

The exception --bananas -- my hubbie's breakfast staple fruit. And coffee. And broccoli and lettuce from California, well, I suppose so, too...So I'm hardly a purist.

Hmm, soon it will be warm enough to sow at least a quick crop of cool-season greens, I hope.

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Greens and clear mountains

A quick trip "up the hill" for a meeting found me admiring the clear view of the mountains and a lovely sunset.

late winter greens from a previous year

A bonus from this trip was collecting greens (arugula, mustards, kale and turnip greens) from my unprotected raised beds. It's rather remarkable how they've bounced back from sudden low temperatures in the low 20°s a couple of times already -- low temperatures are predicted again for tonight.  The kale isn't surprising, but the arugula and mustards?

The mache and creasy greens look great and I've left them for harvest later in the winter! They're quite OK freezing solid, amazingly.

The remnants of the broccoli stems (totally frosted)make me feel better about the woodchuck muching earlier in fall - I probably wouldn't have had a harvest anyway.

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Creasy greens

We had our first creasy greens (upland cress: Barbarea verna) today, a totally delicious green that's a winter and spring tradition in Appalachia. I bought the seeds from Sow True Seeds, a local Western North Carolina seed company, in Asheville, as a bit of a novelty.

A good friend of mine who grew up eating 'creasy greens' had primed my awareness of them, and I thought I'd give them a try.

The plants form low rosettes, and I'd kind of ignored the small patch through the fall (the hakurei turnips were MUCH larger and more robust as was all the arugula and kale - and both were easier to harvest), but being back in the mountains after winter break had me noticing how nice the leaves of the creasy greens looked (in spite of some hard freezes in the meantime).  They were glossy and green without any sign of frost damage.

Collecting a nice bunch of them to quickly stir-fry to have along with our breakfast omelet, I discovered that raw, they're quite peppery, but cooked -- yum!  They're totally delicious, with a texture of a tender kale, and very tasty.

Hmm, I'll be growing a lot more of these in the future (as winter crops, for sure!)

Here's a photo from another seed source, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

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