How’s your Monday going? Ours finds us trying to make sense of the time change, planting seeds, and getting our greenhouses in gear to hold a whole lot of life in the coming weeks. Kelly and Claire are pictured seeding two of the seventy trays of Snap Peas that we’ll start this year. Yep, it is happening! We’re weaving propagation work into our harvest duties, and working up an appetite all the while. Luckily, this is a great week for hashes, mashes and stews. St. Patrick’s Day is great fodder for showcasing (and using up) the root vegetables that are still late Winter/early Spring staples.Mark is deeply sad that our great big field of Green Cabbages froze all the way through their cores earlier this Winter. The plants should eventually flower out into some tasty “Cabbage Raab” this Spring, but if we were to harvest the heads at this point, they’d likely rot from the inside out if we tried to store them, even in the short term. Fortunately, we have a solid alternate this week. Claire, Kelly and Mark are assembling a lovely blend of overwintered kales, some baby leaves from the greenhouse and a bit of Lacinato that is just starting to bud up into “Kale Raab’ in the field. Colcannon, and its variations that incorporate Rutabagas and Celery Root, is a perennial favorite. Or, you could whip up a Friday night Cheesy Charred Kale Pizza With Garlic for Pi Day (or a Caesar for the Ides of March!)

I don’t want to jinx it, but we’ve had a pretty solid start to the soon-to-be madness that is March. Whether this is our false Spring, or a slow buildup to the real thing, we’re making moves. Mark spent most of his day on somewhere between the columns of his spreadsheets and the field rows, which is how you know stuff’s getting real.  We’re pretty sure this is the earliest that he’s ever been able to get out there and do honest-to-goodness tractor work and soil prep. Now, we just have do our best to keep the momentum up and the crows at bay.  Lupa’s got some chasing to do!

Purple Sprouting Broccoli is a weird, unreliable crop. We grow it, because it is delicious and unique, but it is a royal purple pain. PSB is the kind of vegetable that is accessible to eaters as it is a delicacy, rescuing us from the depths of Winter with a shock of purple when we need it most. It is one of those vegetables that endears folks to their local farmers, because they won’t find something that looks or tastes quite like it from a grocer. It is labor intensive, requiring multiple rounds of weeding and cultivation before it has a chance to overwinter. It is irregular. One plant might boom with multiple pounds of leafy little violet florets while the one beside it barely puts forth any shoots at all, so we have to plant a whole lot of it and harvesting takes a lot of time and discernment on the part of the harvester. Did you know that our Purple Sprouting Broccoli crop takes up a larger footprint than all of our rows of Tomatoes combined? It was news to me too until a few weeks ago when Mark was grumbling and calculating during our annual “why do we keep growing this?!" rant in the Winter Brassica field. Pessimistically, or perhaps realistically, we figured 2025 was going to be only one-and-done harvest year (in January, no less) thanks to the one-two punch of early bloom and extended frost. So, I was SHOCKED and ECSTATIC when I learned that we had a nice second flourish, ready for harvest today. The CSA is going to get a sizeable portion this week, but we will have extra for sale in the farm stand too. I’m not going to jinx things by even wondering about a third harvest for this year, but I am stoked that we’ll be able to make folks so happy by way of this very fussy but fabulous vegetable. PSB is a BFD. Kudos to Mark, Claire and Kelly for a very full and luscious rainy day harvest.