Wonderful Purslane!

In early July, I feel like we have to look a little harder in the garden to find something really good to eat.  The spring vegetables are finishing.  Lettuces and spinach are bolting and going to seed in the summer heat.  The spring carrots have all been eaten.  We are, frankly, tired of Swiss chard and kale right now, after using them as staples during the winter months.  We still have snow peas, but they are fading, too.  The summer vegetables haven't really started yet.  The zucchini are an inch or two long in the garden.  I did eat a not-quite-ripe Sungold tomato today! But the tomato plants are loaded with green tomatoes.  Peppers are small and green. 

So what is there to eat?  The answer is quite clear: purslane. 

The first year we lived here, it was the only thing that flourished in the garden, and it continues to be a strong contender for happiest plant around.   And maybe YOU condemn it as a weed and pull it out of your garden and discard it.  Don't!  And here's a picture of it growing in our garden :

 

 

Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is one of the great unknowns (in this country).  It's the best vegetable source of Omega-3s fatty acids, as well as containing Vitamins A and C, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and iron.  It also contains a powerful antioxidants (no surprise: look at that red stem!) that have proven antimutagenic properties. 

 

In the Mediterranean, purslane is chopped up and added to robust salads, sometimes as a pickled vegetable, with mint, arugula, cucumbers, tomatoes, and a lemon vinaigrette.  In Latin America, it's known as "verdolaga," and is added to stews for the last ten minutes of cooking to thicken the stew.  Paula Wolfert, in The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, says, "A healthy, delicious, succulent purslane will stay firm even when dressed with oil and vinegar hours in advance.  The whole herb--tender stems, unopened buds, and plump leaves--is good raw, cooked or pickled."

Here's a link that discusses purslane and has a further link to recipes:
http://web.extension.illinois.edu/cfiv/homeowners/030726.html

I've been trying purslane in a number of ways.  I added it, chopped finely, to a chickpea curry a few minutes before serving.  It didn't change the flavor much, but it was a great nutritional addition.

Our favorite way to eat purslane is in a Purslane and Green Bean Salad that I developed (recipe below).

Purslane and Green Bean Salad

-Serves 4

 Ingredients:

1 medium red onion
3 Tbs. Balsamic vinegar
½ tsp. salt
1 lb. green beans
2 cups purslane
3 Tbs. fresh herbs (such as basil, parsley, summer savory, or any other), finely minced
¼ cup olive oil
1 oz. crumbled feta cheese
Salt and black pepper to taste
Nasturtium flowers for decoration (if desired)

I like to use a method of quick-pickling the onion so that it isn’t so strong a flavor in the salad.

Slice the red onion finely.  Place in a small bowl and cover with balsamic vinegar and ½ teaspoon salt.  Set aside for at least 15 minutes to pickle.  It helps to give it a squeeze to combine.

Cook one pound green beans, cut into bite-sized pieces, in boiling water until just tender, about four minutes.  Immediately plunge into ice water to cool, then dry on a clean towel.  Chop two cups of purslane coarsely, removing larger stem pieces.  In a medium bowl, combine beans and purslane. 

Add to the pickled onion the finely chopped fresh herbs (I use a combination of Italian flat-leaf parsley and basil) and salt and black pepper, added to taste.  Whisk in olive oil.  Pour onion and vinaigrette over beans and purslane and toss together.  Serve garnished with feta cheese and nasturtium flowers, if desired.

 

Nasturitums

Farming is a painful business.

We're getting ready for our first farmers market tomorrow morning at the Delaware Downtown Market in Delaware, Ohio.  We've been harvesting all afternoon and evening, gathering salad greens (our beautiful Red Buttercrunch, pictured bottom right--yum!), fresh herbs, tomato plants, some gorgeous carrots, and assorted odds and ends of produce.  Here's Bryan cutting salad mix:

 

We've been fretting all day, though, about this frost and cold temps that are predicted across Ohio for the next few nights.  O, the horror!  We covered our beautiful (and still green) strawberries with miles of row cover, placed pots and straw and row cover over all 185 tomato plants and the nearly 60 pepper plants that we blithely planted, thinking, "Tra-la-la, there's NO WAY we're going to have a frost now!"  Sure.  Fingers crossed, say a prayer, maybe we'll come through all right.  Look at the garden tonight:

 

Planting time!  There's nothing I love more than garden-fresh tomatoes, and this year I'm really gearing up to have an amazing array of colors, sizes, and types.  And the names!  I love their names!  So far, I've planted 168 plants, and their names follow (in no particular order):

Oxheart
Purple Calabash
Paul Robeson
Black Cherry
4th of July
Cherokee Purple
Aunt Ruby's German Green
Big Rainbow
Sun Gold
Early Girl
Green Doctor Frosted
Prudens Purple
Pineapple
Abe Lincoln
Indigo Rose
San Marzano
Orange-Banana Paste
Roma
Black Krim
Big Daddy
Big Boy
Green Zebra
Ritgers
Sweet Oliver

I'm looking forward to a summer salad of all different colors of tomatoes.  Maybe a little feta cheese, torn up fresh basil, drizzle of olive oil...

Welcome to Frontier Farm!  We’re a small family farm in southern Marion County, Ohio.  We’ve been raising organic vegetables for ourselves for many years, but this is the first year that we’re going to be selling our produce.   We have ten acres, some of which is taken up with our chicken house and yard, and about an acre is under cultivation.  We raise vegetables without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or insecticides  year round. In the summer, we have a large outdoor vegetable garden.  We raised salad greens, Brussels sprouts, carrots, broccoli, and kale all through the winter in a hoophouse (or high tunnel). 

 

Why “frontier?”  There are many reasons that this name resonated with us.  A frontier is a boundary, a transitional zone.  It makes the edge of what’s known and what has yet to be explored.  This is the beginning of a new sort of life for us: raising vegetables for sale.  A frontier, if you will, in our lives.  Another reason is that there’s a new frontier of food in the United States: more and more people are embracing food that has been raised by organic methods and by local farmers.  The concept of seasonal food has become a more acceptable idea.  Maybe we don’t want a dry tasteless tomato in January—maybe we can will ourselves to wait for something really good in August! 

There’s also the reason that Bryan and I still think of this part of Ohio as the frontier.  As an Ohio archaeologist and frontier historian in our “real lives,” Marion County was the frontier for much longer than the southern half of Ohio and the northern lakeshore.  Our farm is located just a quarter-mile north of the Greenville Treaty Line*, a political boundary that meant that our farm was not settled by Europeans until the 1850.  By contrast, the city of Delaware, Ohio, just 15 miles south of us and south of the Treaty Line, was founded in 1808.

*The Greenville Treaty Line established the boundary in 1795 between European settlement and Native American lands after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.  It ceded land north of the line to the Western Confederacy of Tribes (which included Shawnee, Ottawa, Wyandot, Delaware and other Native American tribes), which included much of Northern Ohio, Detroit, and present-day site of Chicago’s downtown).