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the next big green thing
BY SUMI HAHN
My father, who moved to the United States from Korea 40 years ago, can’t help foraging. It’s a compulsion, this need to find free food, gather it in unseemly quantities to force upon friends and family, and then eat it for days on end. I’m pretty sure foraged food tastes better to him not because it’s been growing wild and free, but just because it’s free.
Foraging might be too dainty a term to encompass the full range of my father’s gathering sprees. The gourmet delicacies he discovers in the wild—chestnuts, chanterelles, matsutakes, fiddleheads, kelp, horse clams, butter clams, mussels, crab—definitely fit under the romantic mantle of foraging as an enlightened outdoorsman’s sport. But then there’s the other stuff he turns up, scavenged finds that don’t grow in the wilderness, don’t require a license, and may not always be completely legal to gather.
One example is the feral spinach he scrounges from local Puget Sound farms every February, if the winter has been mild enough. These plants are volunteers, seed from plants that escaped an earlier harvest. The farmer doesn’t want them, explains my father, and will till them back into the ground in early spring unless he gets to them first.
When I ask how he discovered these spinach fields in the first place, his answer is vague. “Oh, you know, by driving around and looking.” A typical forager’s response, to keep your source secret.
Does he have permission to pick this stuff? He hems and haws. I persist. “Well, mostly the farmers don’t notice or care. A couple times, the sheriff showed up.” This is classic Hahn family behavior, to risk arrest for food. But that’s another story.
The first time my father brought me a bunch of these winter greens, they were wrapped in a damp cloth. He lifted up the dishcloth to reveal a squat plant with ruffled leaves and deeply blushing stems. “Winter spinach,” he announced with satisfaction. “The most delicious spinach of all.”
“Your father is absolutely right. Winter spinach is, in fact, the best-tasting spinach.” Those are the first words out of John Navazio’s mouth when I explain why I’ve called. I’m trying to figure out if my father is a lone crackpot or if he’s onto something; my hunch is it’s a combination of the two.
“I won’t eat that baby stuff from California and Arizona; it’s like eating confetti,” Navazio sniffs. He sounds just like my father on the subject.
A retired organic farmer and former seed company breeder, Navazio has more than a decade of spinach-growing experience. He now works in Port Townsend, where he breeds vegetables for the Organic Seed Alliance, which supports the ethical development and stewardship of the genetic resources of agricultural seed. An old-fashioned plant breeder along the lines of Father Mendel, Navazio is considered a national spinach guru. He has just developed two new winter spinach varieties for the Puget Sound that will be available through Seeds of Change (www.seedsofchange.com) within the next two years.
To explain why winter spinach tastes so good, Navazio has to lecture a bit first. “Spinach is a winter annual plant, originally from the Mideast. Its evolutionary survival mechanism is to grow in the fall in its ancestral habitat. The increasing day length in spring would signal the flowering response, so the plant could make seed before it got too hot. So, in the Mideast, spinach sheds seed in the spring, which lie dormant in hot weather, then germinate with the first rains of fall.”
In the United States, spinach has been largely bred to be harvested in spring, a practice that not only ignores the plant’s seasonal preference, but its logical place in our food supply as a fall-winter crop.
Navazio says that the spinach my father scavenged came from plants that escaped a late spring harvest and went to seed. “These seeds lie dormant over the summer, then they germinate in late September-early October. By early November, this spinach has grown leaves the size of silver dollars that fit neatly under an old-fashioned teacup. At this time, plants go dormant in the northern latitudes, because the day length is so short. About 12 weeks later, in February, if we get nice weather, the plant starts actively growing again and putting out all sorts of new tissue, but it’s still cold enough to promote high sugar levels. That’s when your father is harvesting the good stuff, when the spinach is super sweet.”
Where might the rest of us find a local source for my father’s beloved winter spinach, one that doesn’t require trolling miles of Washington farms and possible run-ins with the law?
There’s a long pause. “You’d really have to look pretty hard,” Navazio answers at last. He explains that while there might be a few local market farmers growing winter spinach somewhere in the Puget Sound, it’s not readily available. He knows of a few farms in Port Townsend that offer fall spinach, but he can’t think of anyone growing winter spinach on a large scale, at least not intentionally.
Our best bet, he suggests, is to “go to your local farmers and ask them to start planting fall and winter spinach. Winter greens are a market that Northwest farmers need to discover, now that everyone is interested in going back to eating with the seasons.” The other option is to grow it yourself. He recommends two older varieties, ‘Tyee’ and ‘Winter Bloomsdale.’
I have one last question for Navazio. Spinach, as everyone knows, is good for you. But my father insists winter spinach is healthier and more nutritious, because it has survived the protracted cold of winter. This is common Korean folk knowledge.
Navazio starts to give me the long, scientific explanation, then stops short and says, “You know, your dad really is on the cutting edge. You should just quote him, because he’s right about that too.”
Sumi Hahn is a retired restaurant critic (Times-Picayune, Seattle Weekly) who moonlights on www.sumisays.com when she's not her children's chauffeur.
For more information about buying winter spinach, click here.
For more information about growing your own fall or winter spinach, click here.
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