Spring tends to arrive the same way in the fields every year. The days stretch out, the sun comes back, and after a warm week or two the leafy crops all seem to get going at once. This year the greens and brassicas have really run with it, so there are cabbages you can barely fit in a bag, cauliflower and broccoli coming in faster than anyone can keep up with, and silverbeet, spinach and leeks piling up by the day. The word from our growers is that it's a big season for anything leafy, and there's plenty of it about.
Not every crop is on the same schedule, mind you. Asparagus is only just getting started, the regular season’s strawberries are still a few weeks off, and most other fruit types are quietly doing their own thing. But for greens and brassicas this is the moment, and if you like eating with the seasons it's hard to beat, because the produce is as fresh as it gets and there's more than enough to go around.
Spring is when the box really starts to fill out. Alongside all those brassicas you'll find leeks, silverbeet, spinach, beetroot, rhubarb and spring onions, with new-season asparagus and cucumbers just beginning to appear, and there's usually still a bag of lemons or oranges hanging on from winter before the first strawberries turn up. It's the kind of season that rewards cooking simply and letting the veg do the talking, whether that's a properly crunchy slaw, a quick stir-fry, or asparagus with nothing more than butter and lemon once it hits its stride.
There's another side to all this abundance though, and it's harder to see from the kitchen. When warm weather brings the leafy crops on together, supply quickly runs ahead of what the market can actually manage, and prices start to slide. That's welcome at the checkout and for everyday shoppers, but it's a good deal tougher out in the paddock, because if prices fall far enough some growers end up selling for less than it cost them to grow the crop, and occasionally it isn't even worth the labour to harvest, so perfectly good veg gets left in the ground.
None of which has anything to do with how good the food is. A cabbage that's grown a little too large, an asparagus spear with a bit of harmless purple speckling that cooks straight out, a glut that happens to land in the wrong week, all of it eats exactly as well as anything else. It just doesn't always match what a supermarket shelf is set up to take, and that mismatch is more or less the whole reason we do what we do. When there's more good food around than the usual channels can handle, we work with growers to find it a home while it's still at its best, which keeps more of the harvest on plates and gives the people who grew it a fairer return.
Asparagus is a good example of how fast spring can move. At the height of the Waikato season a single grower might cut more than a million spears in a day, all of them by hand, simply because a spear can put on as much as 17cm in 24 hours and has to come off at exactly the right time. There's no slowing it down, so you either keep up or you lose the window.
The lovely thing about spring is that eating well and eating in season line up completely right now. The greens have never been better, there's more than enough to go around, and every box that heads out the door is one more reason for a grower to keep at it. That's a pretty good way to see in the season, and a very good time to get amongst it.
See what's in this week's box → here
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