Persephone Farm

Sustainably Grown Vegetables & Flowers – Indianola, Washington

Leslie

Subscriber Orientation & First Pickup June 1

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Wednesday, June 1 5:30-7:30 pm

Hors D’oeuvres • Lots of New Information • Garden Tour • First Produce Pickup

CSA subscribers: You are invited to bring your family and join us for an evening at the farm. See your summer vegetables growing! Taste a leaf of sweet Fennel or sour Sorrel as you stroll the fields. (No dogs please. Our chickens and peacocks are free-ranging) It is quite important that at least one member of each subscriber household attend. After this meeting, our pickups will be on a self-serve basis and must run smoothly for everyone to get his/her share of the just-harvested bounty.

We’ll explain the system at the orientation, as well as sign you up for bread, cheese or egg shares, or other delectable additions to our own farm’s harvest, if you’re interested. Each of these is an add-on to the CSA, a delicious way to support local producers, and an opportunity to collect an even more abundant basket each week.

Your first vegetables of this season will be ready for you to take home. The distribution will come at the end of the evening for new subscribers. Returnees may pay their balance, grab veggies and go if you like. Bring a bag or box to carry your bounty down the driveway. Please park on Midway or in the designated pasture area halfway up the drive. Our parking area at the orientation site is limited, please, to those who cannot make the 100-yard walk up the hill.

Your final payment will be due at the orientation. Most full shares have already paid a $250 deposit—the balance is $400. Split shares sent a $150 deposit and have $350 remaining. Checks should be made payable to Persephone Farm.

Rebecca, Louisa, Bill and our apprentices are very excited to see this program starting for another glorious season. We look forward to meeting all our new subscribers and seeing the familiar faces of friends and neighbors.

PERSEPHONE (Greek Goddess of Spring, Flowers, and Rebirth)

Chinese Cabbage for Lunch

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Chinese cabbage with black bean sauce
Rinsed Chinese cabbage
Steaming the cabbage

Today I got a small head of Chinese cabbage from the farm. Rebecca says its “Blues” Chinese cabbage from Fedco Seeds. Fedco Seeds is her favorite seed company, both for their products as well as their vision. Fedco is a cooperative and offers a large selection of certified organic cultivars and regional heirloom varieties.

So back to lunch… I’m not a hardcore foodie, if I’m going to cook it’s got to be simple and easy, especially at lunchtime. I’m a fan of prepared condiments and sauces. In this dish I used prepared Chinese black bean sauce, and Sriracha hot chili sauce for a little spice (find both in the Asian section of your grocery store, Central Market in Poulsbo has a good selection.

Easy Chinese Cabbage with black bean sauce

  • Rinse and chop cabbage
  • Heat a small amount of water in a large pan
  • Add the cabbage and steam for a couple of minutes until it wilts and the most of the water cooks away
  • Add a couple of heaping teaspoons of black bean sauce and cook a minute or two more
  • Stir in a drizzle of sesame oil
  • Top with hot chili sauce to taste

Wild and Fancy Salad Greens – Oh yes!

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Persephone Farm's Wild & Fancy Salad Greens

Persephone Farm is very proud of their salad greens. Rebecca considers them their “signature product”, the first (and most unique) offering the farm produces. She says…

“We started the mix way back in 1991, before the baby salad green craze was even a notion. One thing I like to say about our Wild and Fancy salad mix is that it was never meant to be merely a platform for dressing (as is the case with so many bland dumbed down salad mixes these days.) We strive to have an exciting mouth feel, a variety of flavors, textures and leaf shapes in every batch. We painstakingly comb the fields for wild crafted ingredients in every picking. Some of these are: chick weed, lambs quarters, wild amaranth, (lemony) sheep sorrel, purslane, wild cress, cheese weed, and dandelion greens. It is my belief that these plants offer us nutritional and medicinal benefits not often found in cultivated crops. They are here in symbiosis with us humans, co-evolving to benefit both plant and animal species. Not to mention that they offer unique and special flavors not found in commercial mass produced greens mixes.”

Oh yes! I can testify, this is very tasty stuff—so many textures and flavors of green goodness. A light dressing of olive oil & lemon juice, a bit of shaved Reggiano Parmesano on top and viola, that’s serious good eats (as Alton Brown would say). Oh, you can try to forage around your own yard (I have), but it’s so much easier to pick some up from Rebecca at the Bainbridge Farmer’s Market or better yet, become a CSA subscriber.

Persephone Farm’s Wild and Fancy salad greens are served at many fine restaurants, among them The Four Swallows, Hitchcock, The New Rose Cafe at Bainbridge Gardens and The Port Gamble General Store. Subscribers often get a bag in their weekly share and can add-on extra salad greens if they choose. Buon appetito!

Fields of greens (wild & fancy)

Stinging Nettle Pesto

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Spring nettles
Spring nettles, eat, but don't touch

Nettles? Yes, stinging nettles. The Farm is offering them at the Bainbridge Farmers market while they’re still young and tender. Use gloves to handle raw nettles. Once it’s steamed or boiled briefly it looses the sting, use nettles like other spring greens or spinach. Try some nettle pesto…

Famous food forager, Langdon Cook, has a great nettle pesto post here on his Fat of the Land Blog.

Here’s our recipe adapted from ‘Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life‘ by Louisa Shafia

1/4 pound stinging nettles
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  • Put the nettles in boiling salted water for 1 minute. Drain and let cool.
  • Squeeze out as much of the water as possible and coarsely chop.
  • In a food processor process the nettles with the garlic, pine nuts, oil, and lemon juice until smooth.
  • Transfer to a bowl and fold in the cheese. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Tomato Starts

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Check out the article Bill posted at The Season last May. Tomato Starts–A Farmer’s Guide

Every year, our starts seem to outperform those big, bushy plants you find at commercial outlets like nurseries, Big Box stores and supermarkets. Sometimes ours don’t look as robust as theirs do on the shelf, but as the season progresses their plants’ vigor often wains, and by harvest time a lot have died or are duds, while ours are bearing nicely.

How do we do it? Persephone’s Farmer-in-chief, Rebecca, explains in this guest post on starting your tomatoes.

Read the full post Tomato Starts–A Farmer’s Guide.