Slim Pickings-Early April on the Farm

When the tips of the grass start to green and all of town is talking about spring and all the spring things, that's just about when we get the most interest in our produce that we get all year. Chefs and home cooks alike are just absolutely burning for locally-grown goodness. But it is also the time when we have the least produce to offer that we'll have all year...it's that season when the winter hoop is being replanted to spring crops and the field is still vascillating between winter and spring. Just within the past few weeks, the soil temperature has risen just enough to get early transplants in, to direct seed carrots and a few other hardy crops.
It happens without fail that when the weatherman is pushing the spring agenda, I get emails from our chef partners flooding in, requests for edible flowers, and even tomato inquiries from market customers. I look up from my computer, out into an early April snowfall, pondering whether or not the gamble transplanting we plugged into the field is going to make it through this cold snap. The reality of southern Ohio is that we don't start getting the bulk of our produce coming in until early June. And yet...WE want it too.
Working with the few varieties of veggies coming out of the hoop house, we cook as creatively as possible. But there's no doubt we are chomping at the bit to have all the colors of the rainbow represented on our cutting board too. Every year we get a little bit better at filling the fall-to-spring gap. And as we grow the business of our farm, we'll be able to afford more indoor growing space to satisfy ourselves and the Dayton masses this time of the year. In the meantime, there's no doubt that the luxury of our extensive summer menu is something to look forward to like the countdown to Christmas. At least at this day in age we can indulge in the tropical fruits that come in from Timbuktu this time of the year.
Last night I cooked up the last of our storage carrots with some lamb chops to celebrate my mother in law's birthday dinner. We really should have stuck the candle in those carrots, sweeter than the chocolatey cake at the end of the meal. I don't know if it was the higher brix level of winter carrots, which convert so much more of their starch to sugar than their spring and summer counterparts, or the understanding that we won't be digging any more of our own for another few months...but man oh man we savored the sweetness.
There's a season for everything...and despite the fact that we are relying heavily on root veggies, shoots and micros, pickled goods, frozen fruit and globe-trotting tropical fruit to color our plate, we are content with the fact that we can use all the time we aren't harvesting and washing so much from the field to get the engine going for a good season. Our days are filled to the brim with seeding, flipping the hoop, potting up peppers for plant sale, inoculating shiitake mushroom logs, spreading compost, prepping the field beds, and clearing our desk of paperwork so that it can start to build again until next winter. It's early spring on the farm and it's the quiet before the wild storm of summertime.