Don’t toss your tops!
This week I’ve been contemplating tops. The beauty, becoming, and benefits of a vegetable top crossed my mind many times this week as we were able to harvest some first veggies of the season. Plump Zeppo beets were finally ready to go, and kohlrabi was poised to be set loose from their sturdy little stems. Even more Mokum carrots were unearthed in Hoop Four, and Bridger onions were cropped out of Hoop Two.
Speaking of tops and beets, you can’t beat a pizza night at Hawkins Farm, and Friday is at the top of the week, right? We had some fun, top-themed pizza at our first pizza night of the season, featuring carrot top and garlic scape puree, as well as pickled carrots and fried ham, on the harvest-of-the-week special, brought to you by Volchy, Katie Jo, Tim, and Jody!
While cleaning up the onions on Monday I had a run in with a knife, and my thumb got it good while we were shaping up their green tops. The thumb is fine now, but from that point on I had tops on my mind.
Seriously, don’t toss your tops! I wish I had said it sooner. Carrot tops, beet tops, kohlrabi tops. Don’t toss them, use them! The pretty green, colorful stems aren’t just there for you to hack off and discard into a waste bin. They are filled with nutrition as well! When in doubt, you can probably use that part of the veggie.
Consider whipping up some vegetable stock. In addition to the rich flavor produced by roots and bulbs, there is additional flavor held in onion and garlic skins, herb stems, and carrot tops! Tops! A great way to disperse this flavor is to combine vegetable scraps into a pot of boiling water. You’ll find yourself left with a lot of rich stock that can be added to most kitchen creations.
Do you need more salad in your life? Spice up a mixture of curly kale, lettuce mix, and spinach with some pretty purple beet leaves, hearty kohlrabi leaves (they taste a lot like kale to me!), and carrot fronds. From there, just follow your tummy where it leads you.
Can’t eat them raw? Prepare your favorite stir fry and just toss the tops of your veggies in while you’re at it. Stems work too! A splash of that stock you whipped up earlier couldn’t hurt either.
Just… treat your veggies the way you’d like to be treated, you know? We all grow up big and strong and hope to be useful somehow, maybe in a couple different places in our lives. Vegetables are like that too.
And, if you’re not feeling inspired in the kitchen all the time, maybe you could think about a compost subscription as a backup plan. Dirt Wain is passionate about making our region cleaner and healthier. One way they do that is by collecting extra household food scraps and adding them to their composting piles so that we have more local dirt to grow things in. Your veggie tops would love this experience.
Okay, you might be wondering why I’m so passionate about tops all of the sudden. On top of finding joy in the kitchen with all the tops I got to take home and play with, I also had the privilege of hand weeding just sprouted carrot tops for hours and hours this week. Due to a missed pass with the flame weeder before the carrots emerged, we had to save four beds of carrots from being swallowed up. Their precious little fronds were being smothered by a gang of weeds led by Redroot Pigweed and Queen Anne's Lace. So we crouched down next to them in small installments and gently freed our little friends from certain destruction.
There are many small, fragile friends peeking out of the ground this time of year. Tops are precious! Their little stems make first little leaves so that they can collect sunlight and strengthen the seed to grow into rich carrots, onions, and lettuce (to name a few).
Although, sometimes there are hiccups in this tender phase of the growing process. We experienced a hiccup a few weeks ago when a neighboring farm chose to spray their land on a particularly windy day, causing residual remnants to latch onto much of the exposed tops we were expecting to harvest right around this time of the year. Including a large, gorgeous bed of lettuce.
We all processed this differently. I saw the glum realization of the situation ignite sorrow in many forms on the disposition of my coworkers. On that day I wrote a poem to capture some of the feelings:
We pulled lettuce from the ground
today, one week before their
harvesting date; all from the little white
dots we saw on their little green faces
The yanking got to Erin halfway
through our job, resetting the bed with
tears over ravaged food; little white
dots
This lettuce was beautiful, and Erin
cried for us, for no one else would get
to see, no one would ever get to eat it
All is well, amends have been made, but it still stands that these little plants are precious to us out here. Every last bit! So please, don’t toss your tops!
-Alex
