Green Options

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While browsing the St. Lawrence Market last weekend, I was elated to spot the paisley-shaped heads of fiddlehead ferns. I won’t get into my love for the regional delicacy too much, as Jennie already posted a great recipe, but I felt that - despite their season of only a few weeks - the wild, gamey greens deserved more than one ode to their deliciousness.

Before I’d left the market, I’d snapped up two bunches of ramps and a bag full of stinging nettles among my regular staples. In fact, the stinging nettles purveyor was kind enough to write out a recipe for tea (pictured below). It was my first ever stinging nettle experience.

More on that and other recipes inspired by my wild green windfall after the jump.

Lovin’ Fresh is a series of recipes
designed to showcase produce gathered
from local farms or grown in my own garden

What’s your favorite mythological creature? Unicorns? The Loch Ness Monster?  The Yetti?  Lake Champlain’s Champ?  El Chupacabra?  Up until yesterday, I might have said the Fiddlehead, had I been asked.   Like all the previously named questionable characters, there are many pictures to prove their existence (heck, there’s even a picture on one of my sets of business cards), and yet, somehow, I’d never seen one for myself.  The curly heads rising up on slender necks from the forest floor resemble an other-worldly creature for sure.  And in the culinary world, fiddlehead ferns are almost unmatched in their elusive promises of gourmet delight, much like morels or truffles. 

And you think you’re busy? Zoë Bradbury has three thousand strawberry transplants to plant, two acres of row crops to sow including a diversified mix of everything from carrots to beets to lettuce, thirteen and a half tons of lime to work into the soil for organic fertilizer and a team of draft horses galloping in any day now. And don’t forget the experimental celeriac patch. Add in the role of accountant, office manager and marketing chief and you cook up the range of farmer responsibilities resulting in their annual crazy spring schedule.

The farmers’ market season may not yet be in full swing so we don’t see — nor appreciate — the flurry of farm activity going on across the country as growers get ready to keep us freshly stocked all summer. But Bradbury, a fledgling Oregon farmer starting her growing venture this season, along with thousands of small-scale, family farmers across the country, have been putting in long work days for weeks.

It’s springtime in South Korea. Just a month ago the ground was covered in snow; today the hills are pink with cherry blossoms. Eager solar panels soak up the warm sunshine. On the mountain, wind turbines spin in the sweetly scented spring breeze. In the seaboard city of Gangneung, children’s delighted shrieks fill neighborhood parks.

Over the city, military jets cleave the sky.

The jets that weave all day long over Gangneung are a reminder that for the past 60 years Korea has been a country divided and at war with itself. Gangneung, with its windfarm, solar panels, and cherry blossoms, lies less than 100 miles (160 km) from the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, the world’s last remaining Cold War border.

This week, as springtime blooms, a series of events unfolded which threaten to destabilize the delicate balance between the North and the South.

About two weeks ago, I noticed that the soundscape here in the Northeast is changing. My ears seemed to be calling my eyes liars.

The crocus and hyacinth have not pushed through the still frozen ground. No migratory birds were bouncing around my still-brown lawn. Spring has not shown her face. So I asked Greg Budney, curator of the Macaulay Library at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, if I was crazy. Was something really different?

He alerted me to the fact that many year-round residential birds were now going into a song-mode of reclaiming territory. For example, the female cardinals will now be doing their version of the male’s song. (To hear this, click here and type 49063 into the “advanced search” box) He also pointed out that this is exactly why so many birds sing…you don’t have to see ‘em to know they’re there!

In Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, he explains that you can often follow the ripening of a certain vegetable northward, thus eating the exact same thing, in season, for weeks. It’s nice to know this, as I can look southward in anticipation for what will be coming next month. I can also consult a harvest calendar for my zone, and get a head start on recipe planning. Some seasonal eating guides are available at Sustainable Table, but for most, you will need to type “harvest calendar” and your state name into a good search engine.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this my first year of eating local. Thanks to the grocery store experience, I had become very much out of touch with what was in season when. Each week’s CSA bag and trip to the farmers market brought a surprise, and then I had to scramble to figure out how to fix the bounty while it was still at its best.

Early spring crops must be frost-tolerant and hearty to withstand the cooler temperatures. The vegetables that get planted earliest include cole crops like broccoli and kale, lettuces and greens, carrots, turnips, beets and onions also go in the ground in the first month of spring. Asparagus, which is a perennial, has to be planted three years before it can be harvested. (seasonal guide and recipes after the jump).

My mother taught me not to do spring planting until the oak leaves were as big as a squirrel’s ear. (Unless you want to tempt the fates of frost, that is!) I was blessed to grow up on a farm and be taught the signals of seasonal change. Early immersion in the cycles of nature underpins the values held by many of us “greenies.”

Today, many children know that the rainforest is being destroyed. They can tell you that polar bears are being threatened by climate change. They may even be able to talk about their own carbon footprint. However, sadly, many may find it difficult to name five trees in their own neighborhood or point to definitive signs of spring in their own backyard.

Richard Louv and David Sobel use to the terms “Nature Deficit Disorder” and “Ecophobia,” to describe this growing disassociation with the living world. If you haven’t yet checked out their work…do so!

You’d think in January, Sweden would be cold, blanketed with snow and ice, but not this year.

According to The Local, a hobby gardener in southern Sweden has already harvested the first potatoes of the New Year, with a garnish of strawberries and daisies.

An unusually mild winter in the land of my ancestors has fooled nature into believing spring has arrived. The so-called “killer slug”, a 10-15 cm beast is beginning to eat its way through the new flora, and ticks are ready for suck some blood from anything that bleeds. Even mushrooms have been spotted in a province south of Stockholm.

Read on, one Swedish gardener has a solution for the killer slugs in his [...]