Hello from Pitchfork & Crow ~

We’re harvesting for the Salem Saturday Market!  Here’s a selection of what we’ll be bringing to market:

• Celeriac
• Garlic (slightly sprouting, but still tasty!)
• Italian Dandelion Chicory Bunches
• Kale Bunches
• Potatoes (Only Fingerlings this week)
• Radishes (We’re bringing 90 bunches of French Breakfast radishes!!!)
• Rapini (Brussels Sprout, Kale, Red Cabbage)
• Rutabagas (aka our infamous juicing Huge-abagas!)
• Spinach
• Spring Salad Mix (escarole and radicchio based)
• Sunchokes (aka Jerusalem Artichokes)

The weather is slated to give us another fabulous day at the Saturday market tomorrow.  We prefer a nice sunny day for market (who wants to stand out in the rain all day?) and we know we’re likely to see more of you when the sun is shining too!  It’s the rainy days in between that make farmers like us nervous.  We’re antsy to get transplants out into the fields but need a dry spell of several days before the soil is workable.  In anticipation of the “window” of dry weather, we check the weather report repeatedly and try to will the rain to let up.

This is the time of year we’ve heard referred to as the ‘hunger gap’.  Our winter storage crops are dwindling and the spring burst of growth that we enjoy as rapini is on it’s way out but the first crops aren’t quite ready for harvest and we’re still in a holding pattern, waiting to get the field fully planted for the season.  We’re lucky to have covered space in our field houses that allows us to plant some crops into dry ground earlier in the season, but the small amounts of lettuce, spinach, and radishes never go as far as we’d like.  This in-between time is probably the toughest time to eat seasonally.  As we plan for the future we hope to have more in storage, larger overwintering plantings, and even dry beans to bring to early spring markets.  This week however, you’ll notice our booth will be smaller but we’ll have the first radishes of the season!  Hurrah for radishes helping us through the ‘hunger gap’!

We hope to see you Saturday sometime between 9am and 3pm.  You can find us at the Salem Saturday Market near the intersection of Winter and Union streets in downtown Salem.

Thanks!
Carri Heisler and Jeff Bramlett