9/17/26 Harvest Notes- Welcome to Autumn I Guess!

Farmer’s Pick Half Share: Sweet potato greens, salad mix, basil, okra

Farmer’s Pick Full Share: Salad mix, sweet potato greens, sweet potatoes, amaranth greens, okra, yard long beans, basil

This week’s notes:

Barring a major change in the forecast we’re already likely to have the hottest September of all time, with an average temperature almost as hot as August! But we’re steaming ahead and trying to make the most of what we’re given. The summer garden in fact isn’t such a bad place to be at the end of the day, especially if you like okra.

Our top question this week is probably “what do I do with sweet potato greens??”. Despite being an incredibly well adapted crop and extremely tasty, sweet potato greens never really caught on in the South like they did in Southeast Asia (where they are very common), so let me give you a a quick sales pitch. If you do a web search for recipes you’ll mostly find Asian and African dishes, which are good but may be out of your culinary wheelhouse. Instead, we recommend you just use them like you would spinach! They can go as a cooked green in pasta sauce, beans, stews and soups. They also make a great smoothie. The stems are good to eat as well. Sweet potato greens are nutritional powerhouses and are absolutely loaded with vitamins and antioxidants, and in this regard makes spinach look like wet styrofoam by comparison. We’ve been selling them by the crate to the restaurant Pharm Table this summer (recently ranked by the Express News as the city’s 4th best restaurant!), and they “use them in absolutely everything!” (direct quote). So please give them a try, they won’t be around forever as they need truly hot and humid weather to thrive. We harvest ours from vigorous new growth that comes up after the roots are harvested, the old growth that’s been around all summer is not as palatable in our opinion (and perhaps an explanation of why they’ve not taken off in the US).

And lastly a quick note on salad. There is always demand for leaves in bags, but especially right now with justified concerns about food safety. So we’ve been working really hard this summer to figure out a way to bring you salad in warm weather months. Many traditional salad greens are not heat tolerant (lettuce, spinach et al) and are winter crops in South Texas. But we’ve done a lot of experimenting and found a mix of greens that can take the heat (given enough irrigation!). Our current mix is more flavorful and robust than boring grocery store salad, and contains a few types of very mild mustards, mostly Asian greens like tatsoi and Tokyo bekana and mizuna, with amaranth thrown in for color and some arugula for flavor. They are all harvested at a baby size so they’re very tender. What’s also nifty about this mix compared to something like lettuce is that if you’re tired of eating it raw you can actually use it as a cooked green since they’re mustards. We’re satisfied with this mix and we hope you are too. As the season progresses you’ll see more lettuce and spinach enter the equation, but for now this our answer for salad in our Never Ending Summer.