Fava Tips?

For a long time I’ve heard that you can eat Fava tips, but I’ve never actually had them, or harvested them. Today’s share was feeling a little thin so I thought it was time to try them out. Due to cold and wet and a lot of slugs the first planting of radishes didn’t really work out, and neither did a number of greens that were seeded early in the season for the early and mid spring shares. The fava tips are standing in, and with a little internet searching it looks like they are used very much like pea shoots, and not surprisingly they are closely related. Basically they will be good raw in salad, or cooked as in a stir fry. They taste very much like fava beans, which we’ll have later in the year.

I also cleaned up the thyme planting today and so there’s a good sized bunch of thyme in the bottom of the bag. Left out on the counter to dry in a shady spot, this will last indefinitely. Some of the thyme as woodier stems and with those you can just rub the leaves off. Some of it is newer shoots that can be chopped up whole to season dishes. 

Lettuce and green garlic round out this week’s share. The lettuce is Kweik green butter and the green garlic is thinnings from a soft neck variety that I don’t actually know what the variety name is. I was talking to a garlic grower I know in Southern Oregon today for an article I’m writing on tools for garlic growing and he recommended making green garlic pesto. The ingredient that stuck in my head that seemed like it would really make the dish was a bit of miso.

On the farm I’m trying hard to catch up on plantings. This dry weather is providing an excellent window for preparing beds, and there are a lot of them that need to be prepared. A light frost last night was a bit unexpected, but it made me happy that I hadn’t actually gotten my tomatoes out yet. Nothing that was in the ground seemed like it was actually affected.