In the share this week:
2 lbs watermelon radishes
1 bunch salad turnips
1 bunch red radishes
1 bag spinach
1 bag baby kale
1 head little gem lettuce
Mix of italian sweet peppers
2-3 poblano peppers
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
We had our first true frost of the season on Monday morning! It's just about right on time and was a pretty light frost overall so we weren't really concerned about it. I should probably have taken a picture of the frosty crops to include here, but I'm bad about remembering to take pics most of the time. Many of our fall crops are quite fine with frosts or even freezes down to around 28-30 degrees. I did spend a little time on Sunday afternoon row covering some of our leafy greens just in case they took a little damage from the frost. Probably not so necessary since similar uncovered plants look fine, but better safe than sorry. Now we are in for several very warm days this week, which works out well for us since we need to get just a few more beds prepped for our garlic, overwintered onions, and some more hoophouse greens. I just seeded 3 beds of winter spinach today, and plan to get in some baby kale, mesclun mix and radishes, turnips and maybe beets too. We know that the kale and spinach are hearty enough to survive even below zero temps with double row cover inside our hoophouses, but I haven't tried to seed the root crops at this time of year. It's likely that the radishes may be ready just after the holidays or possibly sooner, the turnips a little later in January and the beets sometime in late February. We'll see how they do! It's always fun to experiment a bit with these things. Lettuce doesn't reliably make it through the coldest temps, so we typically plan to plant it out in the hoophouses in mid to late February for an early spring crop. Speaking of cold, it looks like right after our warm spell, we are in for some mid-twenties at night! We'll certainly have to do some more row covering for those low temps next week.
We have one new item in the share this week - watermelon radishes! These hearty winter radishes have a light greenish outer peel with a bright pink interior. They store really well, so you can store them in your crisper drawer for a few months. I really love this post below for an explaining of how to use these cold weather beauties:
The beautiful little gem lettuces are back this week too! I love this smaller sized lettuce heads because they are enough for about 2 people to have a salad and their coloring is so striking. You could make up a salad with this lettuce, mix in some baby kale and slice some turnips and radishes to put on top!
The spinach is loving the cooler weather, along with the rain we had late last week. The leaves are getting huge! I was thinking that a frittata using your spinach and all of the peppers (sweet italian plus the poblanos) you're getting this week would be fab. You can check out the recipe below for an idea:
Have a great week everyone!