Like a little family, the greens sprout, row by row, inside the greenhouses and outside in Loganita garden dirt, peeking through at our first solid month of sunlight, and teasing the imagination of how our chefs will use them for aroma and taste and texture and d’art.
Kale. Collards. Swiss chard. Arugula. Green and red mustards. Baby spinach. A dozen different herbs, some of them rare.
One, in particular, draws the eye. Rooted and deep, dark green among the sprawling beds of unique, tender, early harvest – Mizuna, one of several Asian greens that you will find only here, only now, grown specifically for only you.
Mizuna is identified by seven other names (shui cai, kyona in Japan; California peppergrass, spider mustard typically in the U.S., but a mustard green by any other name….). This one you’ll find piquant, to the tongue and the mind (tip: close your eyes when tasting), crispy, peppery, leaning toward a tad spicy, though short of arugula. Popular uses include pickling and garnishing smoked salmon. We’ll soon see the twist that The Willows Inn chefs put on Mizuna.
May brings us true Springtime at the table, tossing a ‘thank-you’ over its shoulder to April for its starters, but bent on leading into the maturation of the beets, and carrots, and squash, and peas of late summer. Round Two, we call it, in our bio-intensive farming methods. Bio-intensive? Growing a ton, our hand-to-your fork, in a small space, producing plenty while naturally conserving water, mulching out weeds, and…well, that’s another story, for another time.
And meantime, the chefs continue their foraging apart from our garden. For a glimpse of just a bit of the wonders they find in the wild, read the comments of one of our new chefs about his forage exercise, making mention of reindeer lichen.
Enjoy the leaves and flowers of May.