photograph courtesy tubby creek farm
Sure, farmers’ markets might be known for jewel-box arrays of multicolored heirloom tomatoes, squash, sweet corn, and beans, but lately my enthusiasm has been stoked by one color: green, green, green! And it’s a great time of year for that: Cold-hardy greens are often a farm’s bread and butter crops during the winter.
photograph courtesy tubby creek farm
Randy Alexander
At the Cooper-Young Community Farmers Market recently, Tubby Creek Farm’s table was the first to catch my eye, as usual, with their leafy produce. Josephine Alexander, who owns the farm with her husband, Randy, told me, “The celery, the fennel, the Brussels sprouts, and other greens are what we’re picking fresh now. And right now, because the weather is cold, it makes everything sweeter.” Piled high on display was some of the most verdant celery I’ve ever encountered.
Unlike the bland, commercially grown celery from supermarkets, the bunches I found at Tubby Creek’s table that day were richly hued in green with healthy, crisp leaves and stalks, crying out to be included raw in a salad or to add an almost herbal freshness to a soup or stir-fry.
As I learned, that celery was the culmination of a process that began over four months earlier. “The seeds for this celery were started in the greenhouse on September 1st,” Josephine told me. “Then we transplanted them about six weeks later. Celery is one of the trickier crops in this climate, because it likes cool weather, but also grows really slowly.” For a more stable climate, the plants went into the ground under one of their high tunnels. Still, even protected thus, “when it does get really cold, we also cover the celery.”
“The more we improve the soil, the easier it makes our job.” — Josephine Alexander
From there, the Alexanders must walk the fine line of celery’s ideal temperature range. Even packing the truck can be precarious. Market day would have started before sunrise, when the chill can still be threatening. “I pack the van at 5:30,” she says, and on the drive to Memphis “we’re praying things don’t freeze on their way in. Because it can still be quite cold at that hour. If it’s really cold, we just don’t go to market because we don’t want the produce to freeze.”
I was lucky on this day, when the crisp stalks and leaves that would enliven my kitchen later showed no signs of damage. While the celery was clean as a whistle, I knew its flavor was due in part to the Alexanders’ fantastic dirt. They’ve been enriching their farmland since they started Tubby Creek, their 70-acre property outside Ashland, Mississippi, in 2011, where they grow more than 30 vegetables.
As Josephine says, “The more we improve the soil, the easier it makes our job.” They’ve kept that attention to the ground itself at the heart of their operation, and it’s paying off for them (and their customers) leaf by leaf, stalk by stalk, bunch by bunch.
