Topic — Food & cooking

The continuous harvest in the garden…continues. It’s almost indescribably great to have fresh food just there for the picking to make up every meal! Here, delicious young beet greens.

This red beet variety, with the traditional red-veined leaves, is called Kestrel. We also grow red-and-white striped (Chioggia) and orange-yellow (Golden Detroit) beets, and beets with all-green and all-red leaves. They all taste similar, but not exactly the same, and the colors alone make having a selection well worthwhile.

The way we seed beets, they tend to grow close together, so we have to remove some (that’s thinning) to allow the rest to mature properly. Luckily, the thinnings are a harvest on their own, as the beet leaves are delicious. You can eat them raw—great added to salads—or cook them like spinach. Try wilting them in a pan with olive oil and/or butter, salt and pepper (and some garlic is good). Amazing! :)

Once they get going, onion seedlings tend to shoot up, kind of like runaway blades of grass. When they get up around 8-10 cm (3-4″) range, we use little snips to trim them back to about 2.5 cm (1″). This keeps them manageable under the grow lights, instead of flopping over into a tangle.

What to do with all the trimmings? Eat them, of course! They’re mini-green onions, with a delicate flavor and a pleasant bit of onion bite, at their best sprinkled raw on something light. Like eggs (local eggs usually taste best)!

Our first real harvest of the year is still weeks away, so this is a bit of a tease for us here on the farm, but it’s a tasty one. And the onions do have to be trimmed!