Spring food

This week the spring farmers' market season started in earnest.  I was in my favorite local bookstore buying some Moleskine journals, and I told the checkout girl how much l liked the springy green covers. 

"And there's rhubarb and asparagus up at the farmers' market, too!" she added. 

That's just where I was headed! So I went farther up the street and bought both rhubarb and asparagus, and also bought some ramps (center of bottom left photo, above), a relative of the scallion. They taste somewhere between scallions and garlic scapes.  

But that wasn't even my main farmers' market run for the week.  I went to my usual market today. Oh, boy!  I went so overboard that I may have a hard time using everything I bought. You can see some of the items I bought in the photo at right above. (I always keep a list running on my kitchen board so that I won't forget things in the refrigerator. Vegetables are on the left, things I need to buy on the right.)  

At the Friday market I found yet another new (for me) vegetable: lamb's quarters (top left, above).  I'd heard of them, but had never tasted any. It turns out they have a nutty flavor, and are a sort of wild spinach, so they can be used like spinach or chard. I did a little research on them, because I wasn't sure whether they might be the same thing as lamb's lettuce, or mache. They're not. Some people call them quelites, or Good King Henry, but lamb's lettuce is something different.  Aren't you glad you know that now?  

There's one booth at the market that sells potted plants, so I stocked up for my two roof deck planters with parsley, sage, rosemary, and basil. My chives, tarragon, lavender, thyme, and some pansies survived the mild winter, so I don't have to replant them. And I have a zinnia that I sprouted from some seeds that I keep stored in my cabinet.

That leaves tomatoes. My planter boxes won't grow the large kind well, but they do just fine with cherry-size tomatoes. My mom had sent me some heirloom cherry tomato seeds from her own garden. She just picked them out of the tomatoes when she was making a salad and stuck them in an envelope. I was a little skeptical that they'd come up, so I dumped a bunch of them in one pot. I was even more skeptical when the zinnias came up and they didn't, so I bought some Sweet 100s tomatoes at the farmers' market a couple of weeks ago. (I'd never pass up the chance to buy Sweet 100s in April. Last year I couldn't find them until June.)  

This week, the heirloom tomatoes started coming up. Not just one of them, but four, five, and then on up to ten!  Oops, now I'm not even sure how to separate them!  But they were getting sort of leggy on my windowsill, so I put them in the box upstairs, too. I planted everything else today in the warm sun, gave it all a good watering, and covered the boxes with netting to keep out the Starlings.  I'm already harvesting thyme and chives, so it looks like we'll have a good roof deck season, and the sprinklers aren't even on yet.  I'm feeling very productive!   

Clockwise from top left: 1. pansies, parsley and basil 2. sage, rosemary, tarragon and chives (with Sweet 100s above) 3 & 4. Sprouted heirloom cherry tomatoes on different days 5. tarragon and chives 6. lavender, thyme, and the heirloom cherry tomatoes still in their pot.