Baby Greens at Spade & Plow
KX-1 Baby Kale growing in dense cluster out in the field.
When the temperatures start to lower on the farm and we see mornings covered by a thin layer of frost over the rows and rows of vegetables, we know it is a sweet good bye to all of our summer crops. Although tomatoes, cucumbers and summer squash can’t make it through the frozen nights, the cooler weather means perfect conditions for a larger variety of baby greens in the fields. In the Farmigo Webstore and at our farmers’ market booths we are selling Savoy Spinach, Spicy Arugula, Salad Mix, Baby Red Mustard and the farm favorite, KX-1 Baby Kale. Baby greens have become a fairly recent obsession at Spade & Plow. Although we’ve been growing baby greens since we founded the farm in 2015, we didn’t give them the attention they deserved until he end of 2019. After seeing the response from our CSA members and farmers’ market regulars, we see the value of having a ready-to-eat bag of salad mix in our fridge for an easy meal after a long day’s work. We know there is still a lot of potential in providing a year-round assortment of baby greens for our community.
Baby Salad MIx being harvested with one of our updated hand harvesters
Part of our focus in bettering the baby greens program was looking for tools that would help us grow a larger quantity of more varieties of baby greens more efficiently. We wanted to make this a product that we could provide to our whole community, not just a few select restaurants. The first big step was purchasing a new (or, new to us) planter. Before we were planting with a more traditional vegetable seed planter that allowed us to plant only 9 lines of seed per bed. Planting 9 lines per bed meant dedicating a lot of bed space to an item that could grow much more densely. And being able to plant more densely means not only producing more bags of baby greens per bed, but also producing a leaf that is able to grow taller and straighter by growing up with the leaves surrounding it, making it shade out more potential weeds and and allow for a bed that was cleaner and easier to harvest. We invested in the new baby green planter that could plant a large variety of different seed sizes, and plant up to 32 lines per bed. Long story short, we have tripled the plant density from our previous planter!
But, as with all of farming, the work doesn’t end when the seeds are in the ground. We’ve trialed new ways to harvest the greens more efficiently and cleaner, and continue to better our practices in post-harvest washing and drying.
So far, our baby greens season is off to a great start! We took a lot notes from last winter’s plantings and have been able to harvest lots of beautiful Savoy Spinach and Arugula at the beginning of the season, a crop that’s traditionally more challenging and one that we’ve really struggled with all through last winter. Although the season will get more challenging as we get cooler and wetter weather, we are super happy with the quality we are seeing so far, and very confident going into the winter.
If you are a CSA member you may have noticed that we started offering 2 and 4 pound increments of all of our baby greens. These are a great value option if you have a salad most nights out of the week, or are serving a large family. If you get a chance to try any of our baby greens, please let us know what you think. There is a lot of potential for improving the program with new varieties and improvements to from seeding to washing and bagging, and we love your feedback so we can continue to provided fresher and tastier greens.
Two planting of baby lettuce. The bed on the left was planted 14 days after the bed on the right
Baby Savoy Spinach is welcomed back this week after a long hiatus this past Summer