Okra

The Basics

Okra is used in a wide variety of cuisines around the world, from Ethiopia to Bangladesh to New Orleans. The okra plant can grow up to six feet tall, and have white blossoms. We harvest our okra when they are small and tender– if they grow too large, they become woody and tough.

Cooking Tips

Trim off the stem end and chop into any shape you want, toss into a stir fry, and enjoy. Coat lightly in olive oil and roast in the oven, by itself or with other summer produce.

Also good in soups, gumbo-like dishes, and more. It creates something of a gelatinous texture that gets into the sauce and is very soothing to eat.

Lettuce

The Basics

We grow many types of lettuce, from green frilly heads to deep dark oak leaf to the wonderful red and green New Red Fire. Salads with fresh lettuce are very refreshing in the summer season, and in the winter too, when green is scarce.

Cooking Tips

A simple salad of lettuce and one other ingredient, like thinly sliced radishes, can be wonderful. So can the all-out everything salads with raisins, cheese, chopped carrots, cherry tomatoes, walnuts, chopped herbs, and whatever you have on hand.

Leek

The Basics

Leeks are a member of the lily family and close relatives of the allium family which includes onions, shallots, and garlic. The leek has a wonderful onion flavor, but is much milder. The white stem is used as well as much of the green section. You can use leeks anywhere you would use onions.

Cooking Tips

A good tip for getting the dirt out of a leek is to slice the leek in half long-ways from the tops down to mid-leek where it’s free of grit. Then keep the root upright and run water through the separated leaves, rinsing the layers of leaf where dirt catches, until clean.

The delicate flavor of leeks is delicious in quiches and tarts.

Kale

The Basics

We grow four main varieties, Green Curly (Winterbor), Red Curly (Redbor), Red Russian, and Lacinato (pictured to the left, also known as Dinosaur or Tuscan). Kale gets and extra kick of taste and sweetness when the weather gets cooler.

Cooking Tips

Kale can be used anywhere you use spinach. You can cook the stems if you want. Use in soup. You can juice it. You can braise it. You can make kale chips (kale baked in the oven with salt and a little oil, till crispy).

We love it sauteed with onions (or green garlic), and sauced up with tahini, soy sauce, and balsamic vinegar.

Husk Cherries

The Basics

These delicious little fruits come wrapped in a papery husk and fall  to the ground when they are ripe and golden on the inside.

Husk cherries are also called ground cherries. They are related to tomatillos and tomatoes.

Don’t pick  the ones still attached to the plant (green fruit or husk) – the ones  that have fallen to the ground are the ripe ones.

 Cooking Tips

Just unwrap and eat! They’re fine golden green as well. Sweet, with a distinctive flavor that our customers have described as similar to creamsicles, cupcakes, or pineapple. They make delicious preserves and jam. Try them mixed in with a savory salsa of tomatillos, cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, and sweet corn.

Ginger

The Basics

The Northeast has a shorter growing season than the tropical climates where ginger originated (south China) and where it is typically grown for world-wide sale. Our fresh ginger is harvested young, before the brown protective skin forms over the root (rhizome). We have tips below for use guidelines and best storage to protect the tender root.

The flavor of young ginger is excellent – more nutty and a little milder than typical store-bought ginger, and there is no need to peel it! In the early part of the fall season, we harvest the plant with green tops that also have culinary use.

Cooking Tips

Wash, trim any purple skin, and use anywhere you would regular ginger, in fruit sorbet, smoothies, curries, stir fry, salad, tea, sodas, syrups, cookies, gingerbread, candied ginger, salad dressing, ginger pickle, ferments, and more.

Make aromatic tea with the greens and stems, turn into wraps or stuffings for infusing flavor into cooking meat, or use to flavor soups or stocks. Greens are fibrous, and are best removed before eating soups or other foods.

Fresh ginger root keeps refrigerated for up to about 10 days in a container. Trim green tops off before storing the root part in the refrigerator or freezer. Freezes easily for grating in recipes, plus smoothies and juicing. To freeze the root, wash and pat dry, then bag in a ziplock bag and put it in the freezer. Take out and use frozen ginger root, grating what you need, and putting remainders back in the freezer. Can be frozen sliced or minced as well. Lasts nicely in the freezer for 6 months, and this is a great way to have excellent flavor on hand whenever you need it.

Garlic

The garlic strains we grow are hard-neck, which means they have a hard leaf stalk, as opposed to the soft-neck types you see in store (much of which is grown in China). Characteristics of the hard-neck types are usually larger, easier-to-peel cloves. Hard-neck types are more suited to the colder conditions of the Northeast. We really like the flavor too.

We hang our garlic to dry in the barns, which cures it for longer storage. We hope it keeps until spring. If you have garlic that starts to grow little green shoots, you can still use the whole thing. Garlic is best stored dry and cool.

We harvest our garlic at several different stages of growth, so in addition to the bulbs with dried, papery husks, we also harvest green garlic and fresh garlic.

Green garlic are the scallion-type shoots that sprout from each clove.

Fresh garlic is what garlic looks like before it dries in our barn. If you don’t want to use your garlic bulb right away, leave the top plant on until it is dry (the plant will continue to transfer nutrients from the leaves into the bulb as it dries).

Green Garlic

The Basics

If you like garlic, you’ll like green garlic. Green garlic is what you get when you plant a whole head of garlic in the ground in the fall. It comes your way like a bunch of scallions. If we left them in the ground, each stem, which grew from a clove in the original head, would turn into a little head of garlic (tiny and contorted from being planted so close).

Cooking Tips

You can use the whole thing, from the white part down by the roots to the tips of the green fronds. Use it raw in dip or pesto, sautes, soups, and anywhere else you’d like garlic flavor.