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Operation: Add Greens To Everything
Author: Amelia Vogel
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Harvest spotlight: Rainbow chard
Here in Central NM, rainbow chard grows almost year-round; growth slows only during the coldest winters…and sometimes it gets a little nibbled on by grasshoppers at summer’s peak (but we’re ususally distracted by calabacitas, cucumber salads, and other summer delights).
The leaves are mild in flavor and can be used in all of the same ways you might cook spinach. Try it in creamy cheesy dips (or dairy-free with tahini). Greens love eggs: quiche, frittatas, scrambled, or crack some eggs directly into a pan of sauteed greens and let them poach. And then there are pasta dishes, soups, stews, stir-fries, casseroles, enchiladas, pizza, and more. Large leaves can be briefly blanched (30 seconds, tops) to soften them and stuffed, similar to grape leaf dolmas or cabbage rolls.
The stems are sweet and earthy, so don’t toss them. How many recipes begin with the instructions to soften a diced onion and other seasonings in a pan? This is the time to add your diced chard stems as well.
A note on oxalate/oxalic acid: our bodies naturally create oxalate when our guts break down vitamin C, but too much oxalate can be problematic for some people. You can reduce the oxalate content found in chard and other greens by blanching them for 2 minutes in boiling water. This is because oxalate is water-soluble; an NIH study found that blanching greens in this way reduces oxalate content by up to 90%. Furthermore, the National Kidney Foundation advises to eat oxalate-rich foods with calcium-rich foods such as dairy products or bone broth because oxalate binds to calcium and is thereby flushed from our systems. (Disclaimer: we’re farmers, not doctors, so none of the above constitutes medical advice. Point being, greens are nutritious and proper cooking makes food safer to eat.)
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No Dig Day
While today is Election Day in the US (please vote), it’s No Dig Day according to Charles Dowding in the UK. We’re enormous Charles Dowding fans, having several of his books on our bookshelf that we refer to frequently. The temperatures we see in Central NM from mid-October through mid-April closely mirror the temperatures seen during the same period at Dowding’s Homeacres, so we’re always looking to his books and YouTube channel for inspiration for what to grow during the cooler months of the year.
No Dig = No Till = Sheet Mulching = Lasagna Gardening = Back to Eden Gardening
It’s what we do at Rocket Punch Farm.
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Why don’t you grow…?
While our 2027 food list is extensive, we don’t grow everything. Because that would be impossible: we’re only two people and we only have so much time, energy, and garden space. Everything we grow has been chosen for high productivity, nutritional density, culinary value, flavor, texture, appearance, and climate appropriateness.
Foods we don’t grow because they take up too much space: corn, large pumpkins, watermelon.
Foods we don’t grow because we can’t eat them: asparagus, okra, sunchokes, bulb onions, and bulb garlic. For onion/garlic flavors, we grow green onions, chives, garlic scapes, and Chinese toon…and we grow stridolo, which tastes a lot like asparagus.
Foods we don’t grow because of intense pest pressure and unfavorable climate: Brassica oleracea crops like heads of cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli. Instead, we grow Brassica rapa crops like bok choy, tatsoi, and turnips along with other green vegetables outside of the Brassicaceae family.
Foods we don’t grow because we just don’t like them (sorrynotsorry): spinach, kale, celery.
For green chile, eggs, dairy products, and locally raised meats, we support the hard work of our neighbors.
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Ferments
We’re big fans of using homegrown and local foods to make fermented products for our own enjoyment.
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Change is constant
Hello. Yes, we’re still here, still farming.
See, we started farming at the start of COVID–when everything got really weird–so we were selling directly to customers from home. And then we tried other people’s farmers markets, tried launching our own farmers market, and tried selling through an indoor farmers market that was open every day…until it closed its doors in June 2026.
Over the years, we’ve attracted a small following of passionate locavores who enjoy the boutique experience that only a microfarm can provide. Here in Central, NM you can grow and eat local food all year, just don’t expect fresh tomatoes in February. For a list of our 2027 foods, click here.
November 1, 2026 UPDATE
The following foods are available in limited amounts: tomatoes, carrots, beets (roots and greens), rainbow chard, sorrel, green onions, onion chives, garlic greens, mint, tarragon, lovage, salad burnet, oregano, sage, and thyme.
We expect to harvest daikon, turnips, and mustard greens along with other cold-hardy greens, root veggies, and herbs throughout the winter.
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If our harvest list speaks to you, give us a call, text, or email. You will find our contact info here. Please note that we no longer use any social media platforms as the business operations of those companies deeply conflict with our ethics as regenerative farmers.
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2023 Review and Looking Ahead to 2024
This post is inspired by visitors who came to our farm today, who said they read our blog posts. We talked for about an hour and we could have easily talked for much longer. We love meeting our neighbors and exchanging knowledge about farming in our changing climate.
And what a wild and busy year 2023 was (hence the lack of blog posts)! We had a long, cold spring that went directly into a heat wave for the entire month of July. The insufficient summer rains could be best characterized as a non-soon…and then the first frost arrived about two weeks early in October on Friday the 13th. These conditions resulted in a longer than expected spring lettuce harvest season and an all-too-brief summer tomato harvest season.
Now we’re seeing a wet and cold winter apparently due to El Niño. What will 2024 bring us? Hold on to your butts!
What are we doing to prepare? As always, soil health is first and foremost in our minds. Plants grown in healthy soil are naturally more resilient to whatever comes. We’ve been spreading compost and mulch throughout our planting areas to boost soil fertility.
Since it’s likely that we’ll be seeing more Southern NM weather here in Central NM due to climate change, we need to adopt Southern NM growing techniques. After all, the USDA recently announced the updated Plant Hardiness Zone map and we’ve graduated from Zone 7a to Zone 7b, meaning our winters are now 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than they used to be. As farmers, we try to see these changes as opportunities instead of challenges.
Perhaps out biggest project to prepare for the coming season is building shade structures over our planting areas. We had previously planted honey locust trees for shade, but they aren’t yet large enough. So in the meantime, while the trees continue to grow, we will construct shade structures. We’re still in the planning stages of this project, so look for a future post once we start building.
And what are we going to plant? We’re taking more advice from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange on what to grow during hot summers, some of which we had already been following.
Goodbye Phaseola vulgaris “green beans” (and wax beans and purple beans that turn green when you cook them), hello Lima beans. We had already been growing yardlong beans and we’re adding a few new varieties in different colors.
For tomatoes, we’re keeping everything that was successful last year. All of our favorites and yours from previous years will return. And we’re adding a couple of varieties developed at Southern research universities for added insurance. As we did last year, we intend to participate in H2 Academic Solutions’ Hummingbird Festival over the last weekend of April to sell seedlings. All of the same tomato varieties we grow on our farm will be available to the public at this sale.
You can read the rest of SESE’s recommendations for yourself. Our other crops for the coming year include 12 varieties of lettuce for autumn through spring harvests, bunching onions, lemony sorrel, collard greens, celtuce for pickles, basil in 6 varieties, purple sweet potatoes for both summer greens and autumn tubers, Swiss (rainbow) chard, New Zealand spinach, purple snap peas, potatoes (fingerling as well as low glycemic Huckleberry Gold), Persian cucumbers, cantaloupe, pattypan squash, garlic…and more!
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Agriculture Appreciation Day
We are pleased to share that Rocket Punch Farm will be participating in Agriculture Appreciation Day. We will be giving the 11am presentation entitled “Growing A Small Farm.” Additionally, we will be offering herb and vegetable seedlings appropriate for late March planting. Please see the flyer for additional details about the event.
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Year in Review for Vegetables
At Rocket Punch Farm, we grow over 70 different varieties of vegetables, herbs, berries, and melons…and we plan to add to this list as we trial new varieties. Here’s our Year in Review for this year’s trials:
The Good
Lettuces are one of the first crops of the season as they thrive in cooler temperatures. In 2022, we were able to harvest lettuce sooner because we planted lettuce in our greenhouse in autumn 2021, which over-wintered to become our early spring crop in 2022. Through seed saving, we hope to further adapt our hand-selected lettuce mix to the range of temperatures we experience here in Central NM.
Sorrel will definitely be coming back in 2023. After all, it’s perennial…yay, garden jokes! This leafy green is about as care-free as Swiss chard, which makes total sense when you realize they are in the same plant family. We use sorrel as a salad green (it’s a blessing for summer salads, after the lettuce has called it quits due to the heat), in pesto, and soup.
In 2021, we offered lots of different tomatoes: cherry tomatoes, salad tomatoes, Roma-types for canning, and heirlooms. But we forgot an important category for the living in the land of green chile cheeseburgers: the burger slicer tomato. So we fixed that for 2022.
We gave up on growing rooting radishes in 2021. In the microclimate of our farm, there’s too narrow of a window to grow the roots without having them turn unpleasantly spongy, too woody to eat, or unbearably spicy.
Enter rattail radishes. These are radish siliques (seed pods) that deliver great radish flavor. We especially liked them pickled in vinegar.
Work smarter, not harder. We grow purple snap peas because they are easier to see, the purple color standing out against the green of the vine.
New Zealand spinach isn’t a true spinach, but it tastes just like it. And it doesn’t mind the heat. Unlike Malabar spinach (also not a true spinach but a heat-loving substitute), it isn’t slimy.
We already grew “green” beans in colors other than green: purple and yellow. So we were delighted to add pink as well. As with purple beans, they turn pink when cooked, but we can still enjoy their beauty in the garden.
The Bad
Wanting to mix it up beyond kale and collards, we tried some Brassica greens that were new to us: Abyssinian mustard and spigarello.
They didn’t work. They just kinda sat there and didn’t do anything. Oh well. Back to kale and collards for 2023.
We tried black tomatoes because of how freaking beautiful they look. However, the color does not come from ripening but from a chemical reaction in response to sunlight. So they start out black on the vine and it’s next to impossible to tell when these babies are ripe. No thanks.
Beets are supposed to be a 2-month crop. However, our spring planted beets took over 4 months to reach anything close to a harvestable size. We had similar results in 2021.
We feel that beets aren’t suitable as a spring-planted crop in our climate. We’re currently trying over-wintering some for an early spring harvest and we’ll see how it goes.
Amaranth is another heat-tolerant green for summer salads. Unfortunately, the grasshoppers like this one even more than we did and they chewed it to pieces.
Stay tuned for our new trials for 2023.