Salad Season Begins with the CSA!

May 28, 2024

Throughout the year, our farming family primarily eats foods within the season they are grown in the Midwest, and only minimally uses ingredients from areas outside our region. However, in the late winter/early spring, when my daily cooking has included frozen, pickled, and stored veggies for months, the dinner comments from my family seem to regularly begin with, “Wow, what I wouldn’t give for a spring salad right now…”

The wait is now over! How sweet the first spring salads taste after the wait. CSA members will receive beautiful lettuce heads and salad mix, in addition to cooking greens, to enjoy in spring meal this week.

The wet, warm days and cool evenings make spring the prime season for growing salad mix and lettuces in our region. We grow a variety of lettuces, starting first with more delicate varieties like Panisse oak leaf and then, we move into heartier, heat-tolerant varieties like Summer Crisp and Romaine.

Being a CSA member means we share our bountiful harvests with you (!) and we also share with you news of when the crops don’t work out sometimes. To us, a diverse share includes a variety of colors, textures, flavors, and aromas. We also like to add diversity in the veggie plant parts we’re including in shares, for instance carrots, radishes, turnips = roots, asparagus = stems, greens = leaves, green garlic = bulbs.

The Austrian, winter-hearty pea cover crop is flowering, just in time for buzzing bees to visit.

For those non-greens lovers, try throwing this week’s cooking and/or salad greens into your smoothies, giving your sandwich, wrap or torta an extra boost of flavor, or use them as a delicate bed for your morning eggs.

Happy spring eating!
~ Your Farmers and the Liberty Prairie Team