Late Summer Kale and Soup

 

It's the end of August and autumn is almost here. Things are cooling off. The 100+ degree days are done (I hope). Every day the sun tracks lower. Now, in the late afternoon it clips the tops of some tall cottonwoods growing to our south. They cast long shadows across the compost pile and our onion bed. Around here, corn is finishing up and the lettuce (thankfully) are starting to give tender leaves again. Summer's still hanging on but it won't be long now. 

We aspire to be a four season farm, so while the chaos of summer is letting up, our to-do list is still long. We're still getting our fall and winter crops in (we will succession plant these for a few more months). We need to build our low-hoop houses, need to mulch for winter, need to bend more pickets for floating row-cover, need to green manure the beds not used over winter and we need to keep up with our soil-blocking in the grow room. On top of all that, we are converting another 1/4 acre from weeds to garden beds. The soil is terrible. We're having to double dig and amend very heavily with brown peat, compost and lime (for ph). The workload is still heavy but with summer ending things can happen at a slightly more relaxed pace. It feels good. I'm reinvigorated. And I've been thinking a lot about kale.

We grow kale all year round and while it's good in the spring and summer, in fall and winter it's great. Hot summer days cause tough spindly leaves. But under colder conditions everything stays heavily crinkled and tender. It's one of our best cold weather crops both in terms of quality and productivity. Some varieties (like Red-Winter) can survive all winter long with good protection, providing reliable, fresh greens all the way through till spring.

Over the last few weeks we've planted a full 20-foot bed to kale and prepped another 20-feet for succession planting. We transplant all our kale from soil-blocks. They spend 3-4 weeks in the grow room before going outside, where we lay them in on a six-inch grid. We don't harden kale before putting it in, but instead plant it under row-cover. Kale is shallow rooted, so we transplant a couple inches deeper than it grew in the blocks. Just the top leaves peek above ground. When the plants get a bit taller, 4-5 inches, we will mulch with aged straw to improve moisture availability and to provide a first layer of cold protection. We will keep the  row-cover on all winter, raising it as the kale grows, as a second layer against cold. Finally, before the middle of October we will cover the rows with a low-hoop made from 1/2-inch PVC and 6-mil greenhouse plastic. These three layers of protection should keep the plants alive through temperatures down to -10 f.

In the fall and early winter, kale matures and can be harvested in about 60 days. We pick it just like we do spinach. We harvest the large, outer leaves and the plant produces new leaves in the middle. Each plant is harvested three or four times.

My favorite use for kale, particularly for Tuscan Kale, is in soup. The options are infinite but this Portuguese style recipe is among my favorites. It's hardy and rustic. Not meant for some pretentious soup course, it's a complete meal.

Portuguese Kale Soup

1-2 lbs    Kale (preferably Tuscan, aka lacinato, aka dinosaur) 

1    lg     White onion, diced 1/2 inch

3    clove Garlic

3    lbs    Russet potato, peeled and diced

1    lbs    Pork sausage (brats work, dry-chorizo, Spanish or Portuguese not mexican, is better)

12  c       Chicken stock

1    lbs    cooked white beans (cannelloni or great white) - optional

In a large pot, sweat the onion and garlic, taking care to not burn the garlic. Add the stock and the diced potato. Bring to a boil and cook until the potatoes are almost done, about 20 minutes. Add cooked beans if you'd like. Half puree with a stick mixer, food processor or blender. The potato and beans will creamy everything up and provide a smooth texture. If you don't have a mixer, the potatoes can be broken down with a heavy wish and some vigorous beating. In a separate pan, cook the sausage and dice it into 1/2-inch pieces. If you are using a drychorizo just dice it up but know it will give your whole soup a prominent paprika flavor. Add the kale and the sausage to the soup. Cook it all for another 15 minutes and serve with a hearty bread. Don't use any garnish or fancy croutons here. Just serve bread, the heartier the better, and perhaps some butter.

Tomatoes Part 1 and a Five or Fewer Recipe

It's been a terrible year for tomatoes. Right from the start the weather was awful. We had weeks and weeks of drought followed by weeks of heavy, monsoon like rain. I've never seen anything like it. Over and over again, there would be no rain for weeks, forcing us to irrigate, then we'd get four inches a day for a week, then it'd go bone dry for another few weeks, then six inches overnight..... The erratic moisture led to a major blossom-end rot problem. We tried to combat it. We packed the beds with 12-inches of straw mulch, attempting to balance out the moisture availability. We tested for Ph. We canceled our plans for a compost top-dressing. Nothing really helped. So far, we've had to drop more than 50% of our early season fruit.

Next came the hail. It broke some of our vines and knocked off quite a few flowers. But we were lucky. I know at least two growers who were devastated. They both pulled the plug on their entire tomato crop because of hail damage.


Now, to top it all off, its been cold. Not end-of-the-world, ice-storms in August cold, but certainly not warm enough to ripen fruit. On our farm, the few tomatoes that did manage to set are as green now as they were three weeks ago We've had zero progress. And I'm losing hope for a late season warm-up. Yesterday, I wore a sweater all day, the day before I wore one too.

So here I am, living on a farm, in late August, cooking dinner with store bought tomatoes. Fortunately, they weren't store bought in the traditional sense. These came from a greenhouse operation 11-ish miles from the house (we sell a lot of very local produce at the store where I work). And while it's been a horrid year for all us plebeian, harry-toed, out-in-the-elements, tomato growers, it's been a boom year for the greenhouse guys. They have much more control over their environments and are producing some great fruit. They're also benefiting from pent up tomato demand. Every gardener or grower in the region is suffering a vicious, tomato jones and the greenhouse guys are the only quality game in town.

We used the greenhouse cherry tomatoes very simply in a pasta with olive oil and farm basil. Like most of the recipes I truly love, this one uses less than five ingredients. It's simple, it's to the point and there's nothing in it that distracts from the flavor of great tomatoes.

As is the case with many simple recipes, the secret to this one is in the salt. Before cooking, we liberally salt halved, cherry tomatoes and let them sit for 20-ish minutes. The salt draws out a lot of their juice and moisture. Then we cook the tomatoes in a good olive oil, first adding the tomato bodies and after a minute or two adding the extracted tomato juice. The sauce cooks quickly, 7-ish minutes. If it over cooks everything gets mushy and looses it's color. Let the sauce cool a bit then add some julienne farm basil and adjust the salt. That's it! Great tomato sauce with only four ingredients.

Cherry Tomato and Basil Sauce

2 pt Great, fresh cherry tomatoes , halved

2 tsp Sea Salt, plus more to finish sauce

1 c Extra Virgin Olive Oil

4 oz Fresh Basil, julienned

1. Halve tomatoes and gently mix with 3 tbs sea salt. Let stand 20 minutes.

2. Add oil to hot pan and bring oil to sauté temperature.

3. Add tomatoes, salt mixture to hot oil with all extracted liquid.

4. Cook 5-8 minutes, stirring regularly.

5. Let cool for a few minutes and stir in julienne basil and add salt to taste.

6. Serve over pasta. Garnish with any leftover basil.

so much depends upon ... transplanting

We transplant everything we can on our micro-farm. Even some things that probably should be direct seeded, like peas and beans, get transplanted. Recently, we've been preparing our Fall and Winter plantings; cutting soil blocks, planting seeds and germinating tray upon tray of sprouts down in the grow room. It's been a lot of work and taken a lot of time. Now our cool and cold weather crops, kale, broccoli, mache, endive, leeks and many others, are in and growing happily under the lights. Kale (shown above) were the first to emerge. Leeks are still a bit out. Soon they'll all go outside for a week or so of progressive hardening before finally getting transplanted to a farm row.

Transplanting takes much more work than direct seeding. In total, I can spend up to 15 hours chaperoning a 20-foot row of kale from seed to transplanted farm bed. Alternatively, if we were direct seeding, I could drop a few hundred dollars on a Planet Jr. bulk seeder and get the whole row planted in under an hour. Most "tiny", market-farms work at least 2 1/2 to 5 acres. Even small greenhouse operations usually cover at least an acre. All these folks probably do a lot of transplanting. But, with so much land to work, time is a limiting factor. For them, a large amount of direct seeding makes sense. For us the calculus is different. Farming our paltry 1/2 acre, it's really a question of space. Sure, we're super pressed for time. but ultimately we run out of land before we run out of daylight. We need to make the most of every inch. So, regardless of how much extra work or time it takes, we need to transplant.

A well planned, well executed transplanting regimen can make our micro-farm larger. Not larger in any physical sense but larger in yield per unit area. It's like magic.