Hattie’s Garden delivery/pickup service continues to bring you fresh and wholesome food. We are now taking orders for the Saturday, April 10 Pickup/Delivery Service.

The deadline for placing your order is Tuesday at 8PM. We suggest you place your April 10 order as soon as possible to be sure you get what you want, as we do run out of some things.

What’s Available through the Online Order System

The following items are available now to order for pickup or delivery on Saturday, April 10.

Hattie’s Garden now has many lovely organic and heirloom lettuce varieties ready for your garden. Did you know that Black-seeded Simpson is a 150 year old chartreuse loose leaf lettuce heirloom that can get 16″ across? It is tender and delicious and you won’t find it in a supermarket because it is too fragile for much handling.

Most of our lettuce selections are different than anything you could find anywhere else. We have eight different kinds ready. Some of the butterhead selections such as the German Pirat and the Blushed Butter Oak are also among my favorite. We have other cool weather vegetables, flowers and herbs available through the order form this week.

Our earliest outside harvest is also ready for this week. Austrian Winter Pea is a very cold hardy cover-crop we use to enrich our soil along with winter rye. As it happens these pea tendrils are sweet and good and some of the best. A farmer in New England noticed that his Cambodian workers would go into the cover crop and harvest these tendrils before they went home at night. When I read this story, I tried them and was amazed at how wonderful they were. We use organic seed so these are just perfect for your salads, etc. They are limited to one per customer while they last.

Within another couple weeks we will have more produce, including young arugula, loose leaf lettuce, Hakurei turnips and more. It’s a slow start with our cold nights, but things are up and growing.

You may order the small six-packs of plants directly through the order form this week for delivery or pickup Saturday. Later in April, as more things are ready, we will begin our weekly plant sales and most plants will be pick-ups directly from the garden, unless you need to make special arrangements.

Totem Farms brings you an assortment of nutritious microgreens and is busy bringing on the produce from their high tunnels. This week they have a baby kale, flowered collard greens, a new salad ingredient you may love called claytonia (miner’s lettuce), a nice light Asian green known as Tokyo Bekana and large white globe turnips. There herbs are also making a comeback. Fresh Harvest Hydroponics has butterhead lettuce, mixed lettuce and romaine lettuce available.

Nancy’s Café has new menu items including sweets, soups, chilis, quiche, scones and more. We continue to have an assortment of jams and jellies from Backyard Jams & Jellies.

We have free-range whole chickens and half chickens from Dittmar Family Farms and wonderful free-range chicken eggs from Twin Posts. Alaska Wild Seafoods family-run business has Pacific Cod, Pacific Rockfish, Coho Salmon, Sockeye Salmon and Smoked Salmon fresh frozen directly from the boat and flown to the east coast every week.

King Mushrooms brings to us a large assortment of fresh mushrooms, including some difficult to find exotic varieties with amazing health benefits. We get fresh honey from Chrissy’s Bees (part of Stag Run Farm), and delicious aged and fresh cheeses from Chapel’s Country Creamery, made on the farm using milk from their grass-fed cows.

What we are Planting

It was colder than normal last week and we struggled to work a bit outside. We prepared some beds just before the rain and were able to plant a bed of onion plants, two beds of cool weather flowers and a nice bed of sugar snap peas we had started in little tray plugs to give them a head start. Everything survived the two very cold nights, but it was touch and go. We moved a few things into the garage from the hoop-house overnight, covered a few more things and prayed. We are hopeful this is the last of it as we are stacked up in the house with all our lights occupied with baby plants from peppers, to eggplants, tomatoes, basil and more. It seems to happen this way every year!

Vermont Compost Potting Soil is Coming for you!

This week we should receive our potting soil for you from Vermont Compost. We will send out a separate email when it arrives so that we can include it as a pickup or delivery for Saturday. Shipping is a bit unreliable these days, so we shall see.

We will offer two kinds of potting soil in 20 qt. bags: Vermont Compost Fort Lite, (a complete germinating and transplant mix, and is particularly desirable for growers using smaller celled flats or hanging baskets) and Vermont Compost Fort Vee, (a compost-based germination and/or transplant mix, designed for *soil blocks, trays, and pots). There is no better potting soil company that I know of.

Yours in the Garden,