You Can Eat Those?

This is the last week of the Summer CSA!  We made it!  Thank you to all our fabulous CSA members who have joined us on the journey through this really super challenging summer.  I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but it’s been a real doozy.  I hope you have enjoyed this chapter of eating locally and seasonally.

You can eat those?!?

Sweet Potato Greens are in the shares this week!  I was introduced to sweet potato greens when I worked with community gardens in Memphis, eight years ago.  There was a garden in a neighborhood with many immigrant families, including a significant number from west Africa.   At that garden, the sweet potato greens were as popular as the tubers.  And West Africa isn’t the only place people eat sweet potato greens. (Here’s an authentic recipe from Guinea for sweet potato leaf stew with goat meat)  In Korea, the stems are eaten as a vegetable in soups and as a side dish.  There are many recipes from the Philippines, as well.

Eat the whole plant!

There are a lot of vegetables that are given short shrift, we eat just one part of a plant and overlooking the rest.  Of course, southerners know the importance of the turnip green along with the turnip.  We eat green tomatoes as well as red ones.  We pickle the watermelon’s rind.  Some people ask us especially for the cabbage wrapper leaves.  There is an economy of frugality found in southern food traditions.  For some reason, sweet potato greens have been left out.  I think it is time that changed.  Already I am seeing many more search results when I look for recipes and information about eating sweet potato greens than the first time I did a few years ago.

Snake hunting … I mean sweet potato leaf harvesting

We don’t harvest sweet potato greens very often because they are time consuming to pick and they are unfamiliar to many.   The sweet potato patch is looking fantastic right now.  Hopefully what is going on underground is as good as what we are seeing topside. It is a thick tangle of vines and leaves.  All those leaves mean you can’t see the ground when you step.  That combined with all the rain we’ve been having sets the stage for some encounters with snakes.  We see the most water moccasins in the garden when we’ve had rainy weather.  As much as possible, we picked the sweet potato greens from the edges of the patch.  We didn’t spot any snakes today.  How many snakes spotted us, I couldn’t tell you.

How to prepare sweet potato greens

To prepare your sweet potato greens, remove and coarsely chop the leaves.  Leaf stems should be finely chopped and the tougher stems discarded.  Compared to other greens, sweet potato greens have much less moisture (this is an adaptation to thrive in summer’s heat) so you may want to add a little liquid when cooking.  They can be steamed, sauteed or simmered.  Add the stems first and allow them to soften before adding the greens.  The flavor is a little bit like chard in my opinion, which means they go well with pasta or eggs.  Here is a simple, basic recipe for sauteed sweet potato greens.

Eight more inches of rain is eight inches too many

On Thursday we made 13 beds (hooray!).  Friday morning I spent a couple hours setting up the irrigation.  I guess I could have spent that time doing something else because on Friday afternoon it rained.  It rained again Saturday.  It rained again Sunday.  We got eight inches of rain in those three days.  How much rain is that?  It is five gallons per square foot.  No matter what the weather man says, we have to be ready.  We have to be ready for rain at the same time we are ready for no rain.   We got eight inches while our friends up in Arlington got none.

At time same time I was setting up irrigation, I seeded carrots and covered the beds with row cover.  I didn’t want the rain to wash the seeds away in a “gully washer”.  Carrots are the only crop I will seed into a fresh bed.  They take long enough to germinate that I can flame weed them after the weeds sprout but before the carrots do.  Even with the row cover, I am pretty sure that eight inches of rain washed all the carrot seeds away.  Can it stop now, please?  I’d really like to plant the fall garden.

Small Shares

• Butternut Squash
• Sweet Potato Greens
• Assorted Tomatoes
• Eggplant
• Okra
• Red Pontiac Potato

Full Shares

• Butternut Squash
• Sweet Potato Greens
• Juliet Plum Tomatoes
• Eggplant
• Okra
• Red Pontiac Potato
• Long Beans