April/May News 2019

All of our potatoes and onions are planted, we’ve transplanted some early kale and sowed the first beds of salad and spinach, so good progress there. We’ve harvested some flat lettuce from a poly tunnel, as well as claytonia leaves for the salad bags – good to have some new crops. The wild garlic is almost finished but the green/wet garlic is ready to harvest, so look out for that. We still have some of last season’s crops in the fields, spinach and chard, as well as leeks and cabbages. 

We’ve been re-using your returned plastic bags to pack potatoes in for the box scheme for some time now but we’re now getting more returned than we need so we will be sending them for recycling. Our current waste/recycling provider will take them for recycling. So please continue to send back our clean plastic bags for us to re-use or recycle (but not any other plastic bags please). We’ll also continue to bunch greens when the leaves are big enough and the temperatures cool enough to cut down on plastic bag use and we’re going to try out some home-compostable bags soon to check their suitability for greens and salad, and also to check how easily they do actually break down in a home compost heap. Look out for these and test them in your compost heap if you can or return to us.

Chard is usually in the veggie boxes once a month (sometimes more), as we try to alternate between chard, spinach and kale when including a leafy green. The leafy part can be a substitute for spinach in any recipe and when the stem is thick, it’s good sautéed on its own, or just steam for a bit longer than the leaf. (The spinach we grow for most of the year is actually perpetual spinach (same family as chard) and we usually grow some annual spinach as an early crop, so ready in May/June).

This recipe looks good – I’m going to try it soon https://www.growingcommunities.org/recipes/chard-and-parmesan-tart-oat-and-carrot-crust                 Thanks from all at Ripple Farm Organics