Next lets talk about the Calendula Flower. The petals can be used in salads and the leaves are also edible but not known to be palatable. Interestingly, it’s traditionally been used as a culinary and medicinal herb. It’s been used to color dishes and cheeses and also for antiviral, anti-inflamatory purposes among other uses. It should be noted that it can cause allergic reactions and should be avoided during pregnancy and lactation.

As for Broccoli Rabe, it can range from mild to peppery and the flavor is (surprise, surprise) much like broccoli. Ours happens to be sweeter. To prepare, cut off below the point where they start to branch out and discard those tougher portions. The rest you can blanch, drain and then saute, braise or stir fry with other ingredients like garlic and vinegar or soy sauce.

For the Arugula, we are coming to the end of this round and they are getting quite spicy at the tops–take a nibble and you’ll see!! This might be fun to have on a sandwich or burger where you might otherwise use horseradish. Or you can put it on pizza just as it comes out of the oven, stir it into risotto or soup just before serving, or mix it with milder greens like lettuce to have a salad with an occasional bite. Spicy or not, arugula is also always good with crumbled cheeses, nuts and a vinaigrette.

Our mustard greens are pretty young and tender but they still have a bite. They too would be fun on a sandwich or burger to enhance the mustard flavor. Generally mustard greens are blanched and then sauteed or stir fried with peanut oil, garlic, ginger and soy sauce and mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine), but we dare you to try these fresh with a vinaigrette if you like their fresh flavor after a nibble.

And can’t end this post without acknowledging: Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop. These are mostly his ideas revisited.

Some may ask, “Who is Joel Salatin?”

He’s the farmer that was made famous by Michael Pollan’s Ominvore’s Dilemma. He’s also a farmer we try to emulate. And he has a new book out . . .

We hope you will join us. Either way, be sure to spread the word among your food interested friends.

Find out more and buy tickets here.

As the season continues to advance in its wonderful growing ways, we are selling whole oven-ready chickens, eggs and possibly veges at the farm, 5145 McDonald Ave NE, between 3 and 6 p.m. tomorrow and Saturday (May 11 and 12). Bike, walk, or drive (if you are farther flung) on over and pick up a chicken to barbecue (our favorite way to have a Heyday chicken). We’ve posted the recipe on Facebook.

We are also on to our second week of garden subscriptions. This week we have some of the usual suspects, and a surprise or two.

The herb mix includes fennel, lavender, oregano, thyme, sage and a calendula flower.

Pea shoots can be eaten a number of ways, like stir fried or added to salads.

I like arugula because it makes such a nice nutty salad green that is delicious with your favorite crumbled cheese, nuts, olive oil, and either vinegar or lemon juice.

If this makes you salivate and you don’t yet have a Garden Subscription with us, you can sign up here, to start next week rather than tomorrow. Or if you’d like to be on a back up list for any of our subscriptions from eggs to chicken to garden, let us know (info@heydayfarm.com). People occasionally go on vacation and would love to have someone waiting in the wings to buy that share of the bounty.

Soon we will house these buckets in recycled cloth shopping bags with the Heyday logo on them that will look something like this (this bag is a sample so it doesn’t have the logo yet):

Get in touch with us if you still want to sign up for a box. We will continue to sign people up as the season progresses till we fill up, subtracting the weeks that you missed from the total cost.

As far as recipes go, we highly recommend the cookbook: Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop as a wonderful way to learn about how to store and cook a wide variety of vegetables so their best features are highlighted.

Here are some ideas for a few of the items in this weeks’ bucket:

Sorrel: It has a lemony flavor, so consider sauteing for a compliment to potatoes (as a side dish or in soup) or fish. It’s tender, so reduces quickly to a sauce-like puree.

Kale: Saute onions in olive oil (or Heyday lard if you’re one who has gotten pork fat from us and rendered it into lard) till just beginning to brown. Steam or boil kale for approximately 10 minutes. Drain and rinse with cool water and spin dry if you have a salad spinner. Add kale to onions and saute for a few minutes until there is very little liquid left in the pan. Add a splash of balsamic vinegar (hear it sizzle!) and serve.

Boc Choy: Good for braising and stir-frying. Separate the leaves from the stalk and cut off any tough parts at the bottom of the stem. When cooking, add the stalk first because it will require a few more minutes cooking time than the leaves.

That’s all for now! Have a wonderful weekend.

When we sell our chickens on May 11 and 12, 3-6 p.m., we will also likely have Heyday pork (USDA portion-sized cuts), eggs and vegetables available for purchase as well!

Speaking of vegetables, we still have room for more folks to sign up for a Garden Box. That means that starting this week and going into September, you can pay $500 up front and then we will provide you with enough vegetables to feed 2-4 people every week. You will also get a couple of Heyday Farm recycled cotton grocery bags that your produce will be packaged in. We will try to coordinate pickup with other Heyday subscriptions (like for eggs and chickens) if you have them, but all pickups will be on the farm for now.

And in other news, did you see the recent article in the Bainbridge Review about our livestock guardian dogs, Olympus and Rainier?

For even more current news, you can visit our Facebook page where we’ve posted a recent video of the dogs and a tip about how to make really fresh eggs that are hardboiled easier to peel.

Speaking of Rainier and Olympus, the dogs did well on one of their regular walks amongst the chickens this morning. Rainier bypassed an egg without a word from me! As a side note, one of the perks of the job is giving those eggs that end up in the field instead of a nesting box to the pigs–the grunts and yolk running down the chin . . .

And in other news, we had a great turnout of people wanting chickens and eggs last weekend. We sure enjoyed seeing everyone and trust the dinners were fabulous! We always love comments here that include recipes . . .

We hope to see you there!

Related to the weather, spring is here (albeit one of the wettest Marches on record) and we are busily tending starts and transplanting an array of organic garden produce for the season. Here is a sneak peek at some of the items we plan to offer: imperial artichokes, five color silver beet chard, red cash lettuce, walla walla onions, prudence tomatoes, purple peruvian potatoes, lacinato kale, kaitlin cabbage, marketmore cucumbers, leonardo radicchio, red kuri winter squash, double standard corn, lemon grass, arugula, champion collards, bulls blood beets, rattlesnake beans, yaya carrots, golden frills mustard, British wonder peas, Samish spinach, and much more.

Sign up for our weekly garden box at heydayfarm.com/store or get in touch if you’d rather pay offline: info@heydayfarm.com.

Our training has progressed and regressed all in the same breath. We removed the kennel, added a new shelter, and gave them free reign with the chickens and they were doing great until one morning when they didn’t do great.

But anyone that has spent any time in training a dog knows that all training issues come back to the human.

So here’s what happened. The chicken house did not get closed up properly one night. So, come morning, when the chickens came out unexpectedly—the dogs got playful and pounced and we sadly lost one of our layer hens. In spite of having a lot of layer hens, every one is important to us and that is why we have the dogs–to provide an additional level of protection beyond the electric fencing and night coop from circling raptors, raccoons, coyotes, minks . . . so even though it feels a little like the fox is in the hen house now, we are keeping that long range goal in mind.

That day we moved the hens to the upper pasture to fresh grass and so the dogs went too and we hoped that the transgression was a one-time occurrence.

But alas, I went out there the following morning and called to the dogs. Olympus came but Rainier vanished from site and came back with a chicken in his mouth.

To his credit, I called him over, he came, and left the chicken alive. But that was one time too many.

So, we fenced the dogs next to the chickens and now they are on supervised visits until we feel that the chickens are safe with their protectors.

And then there is the egg eating.

We can’t blame them for eating eggs, but we can’t allow it either.

So, I tried taking the advice of one of our friends and blew out a couple of eggs and filled them with mustard and horseradish (my crafty egg painting experience as a child came in handy for that). Then, we planted the eggs and watched eagerly as they . . . ate them. We’ll spare you the video of our failure, as it’s too painful to watch.

Then we took the dogs to see the chickens and they eagerly looked for eggs. On the flip side, when Olympus got one in his mouth and Craig said, “leave it,” he did.

Finally, the best news about training is that we had a phone consult with Jackie Church whose manual we read on training Maremma’s. She gave us some fantastic insights, the best of which is that we can love them like crazy and they will work even harder for us. I had misunderstood her manual, thinking they would bond to us instead of the stock if we were overly affectionate . . . but not so, she says.

So we are enjoying them even more now.

She also gave excellent tips on how to nip their brotherly squabbling in the bud. They can turn anything into a sibling issue—food, people’s attention, protectiveness. So, we are gently reminding them that we are in charge, that we love them both, and that fighting is not okay. And as usual they are intelligently filing the information away. Yes, they are puppies, but they are working dogs through and through and they clearly love that they have a job to do.

It’s one of those odd events on the farm – needing to water the seed starts in the greenhouse when it is so wet outside, but it is sheer pleasure to duck inside and enter the tropics of the greenhouse. While our late winter has been around 10 degrees cooler each day than normal, the greenhouse inside has been around 70 degrees – give or take a little. It is so delightful!

One fun note is that we are using soil blocks for seed starting. It may seem like a fancy lad sort of thing but it really is important to us. By using soil blocks we are able to reduce the amount of plastic we use in the greenhouse. Also it is a less stressful way to transplant seed starts once they are ready to go outside. There is an air barrier around the block and the roots tend to stay inside the block rather than wrapping around the bottom of a plastic tray. So when blocks go in the ground they don’t need to be broken up at all they just need a precise hole dug and to be placed and nestled into place. We are using the Eliot Coleman soil block recipe sans peat moss. Instead of peat moss, a non-renewable resource, we are using coir or coconut fiber husk fibers. Coir is super absorbent and helps with water retention in the block. So far so good with the substitution.

So on the next dry stretch – three days that’s all I need! –  the planting outside will begin in earnest. We have peas, broccoli raab, garlic, and lots of other seeds that are just waiting to go in the ground.

Also we have a few garden shares available, check the Heyday Farm Store for more details.

Here is a sample box description for early June:

Lettuce, arugula, fava beans, peas, mustard greens and bunching onions.

Sign up now and get ready to add some delicious veggies to your other Heyday Farm offerings  - eggs, pork, chicken, turkey, and beef. Hey, we’re a one stop eating experience!