At the greenmarkets the selection is growing. Already there are lots of great fresh things to be found, with new foods and new vendors appearing each week. At the Greenpoint and Borough Hall markets last weekend I found the early season’s offerings on full display, and as usual more than a few surprises.

In Greenpoint, at the Garden of Eden booth, I treated myself to some pea shoots, and indeed they were a treat, with a delicious, pea-like and very spring-like flavor. The shoots are harvested from the tender tips at the tops of the pea stalks, above where the older part of the stem thickens and becomes fibrous. Where they’re pinched off the stems will branch into multiple new stems, and of which will eventually flower and produce pods full of shelling peas.

Also at Garden of Eden I picked up some Thumbelina carrots – also known by the less cheerful name ‘Parmex carrots.’ They were knobby and round, some of them hardly bigger than a walnut. They’d been wintered over – in the ground since last fall and pulled up only recently to be brought to market. Wintering over concentrates the sugars, making the carrots sweeter and more intensely flavored.

A tableful of dried beans was on display at the Cayuga Organics booth. Cayuga is a newcomer to the market – this is their first year at the NYC Greenmarkets, and only their second week at the Greenpoint market.  And dried beans are themselves something of a newcomer too, and are seen pretty rarely at farmers’ markets. Kate, at the Cayuga booth, explained that the few farmers who have brought dried beans to market have had to sell them at discouragingly high prices because they’ve processed the beans by hand. Producing beans on a large scale requires a fairly high level of mechanization for shelling, sorting, etc. Cayuga has invested in the equipment for processing of their crops, and so can sell them at a friendlier price.

They’d also brought whole wheatberries and spelt berries, but had sold out of them earlier in the day. Cayuga and a neighboring farm have invested in a grain mill, and soon will be bringing freshly-milled, whole grain bread flour to the market. (They haven’t determined yet whether they’ll also be producing all-purpose whole grain flours, which require additional processing to remove some of the proteins). By bringing beans and grains to the market, Cayuga is expanding the notion of the greenmarket beyond produce and farm-raised meat to include staple farming. I look forward to visiting their boot throughout the summer to see what they’ll bring!

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