Forty perennial food crops we sell to chefs
Do you ever wonder what you could grow that a restaurant would buy? Something different than the regular vegetable crops? Are you thinking about how to reduce your carbon footprint? Are you looking for a niche market that won’t take all your time and effort in buying seeds, starting and planting transplants and hoping for a good year with weather and markets? Are you looking for a way to set your farm apart from others and will brand you as the go-to for truly special ingredients?
At Spence Farm, nearly 20 years ago we began digging and selling wild ramps, or wild leeks, from our cousin’s woodlot. He had 26 acres of solid ramps that were mostly choking out much of the other understory vegetation in that woodland. We started by selling to a couple of national wholesale distributors who then shipped our product to chefs across the country. Our season went from mid to late March until late April — usually 5-6 weeks. We would harvest about 1,000 pounds per week and deliver or ship all the ramps to these two distributors. We soon discovered that we could drive two hours to Chicago and make connections with chefs in the city who would buy from us directly. That was the beginning of a long and beneficial relationship that continues to this day.
Once the wild ramp season concluded at the end of April, our new chef friends asked what we had coming up next. At the time, the ramp gig was just a part-time thing, as we were still deep into making and selling furniture. However, we saw an opportunity to utilize our farm and the different ways we could supply unique items to the chef community. We did plant many of the regular vegetable crops like radishes, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes and peppers. But we began to look around our farm for the hidden edible treasures that resided there too.
As time passed, we became known for many of our wild-harvested crops. Now, not every chef uses or knows how to use all these unique ingredients. But we continued to offer them, taking samples to chefs and encouraging them to visit for a walk-and-talk-and-taste tour. Over the years we have continued to cultivate many of the plants that were growing here natively. We also began to add flowers, shrubs and trees into the yard and landscape of the farm. Like I said, not every chef is going to know what to do with all of these, but this gives you an opportunity to do some research into what edible perennial crops are in your area or can be planted and nurtured into a harvestable stage. It also allows you to study up on what parts of the plant are edible and when. It beckons you to know what plants are NOT edible too.
What follows is a partial list of the perennial food crops we sell to our chef community, both in Chicago and downstate. Some of these have become sizable harvests each week or season. Some are very fleeting as to their edible stage. However, all of these together help to add to the bottom line of our farm’s income. There are dozens more, but this is our experience of what has gone well. Each geographic area will have things that are unique. See what you have in your area!
Wild ramps and wild garlic allow for a very early spring harvest and help you get your foot in the door. Soon to follow will be wild cicely, which has an amazing, sweet licorice flavor. Redbud blossoms provide a sweet, tart splash in April, along with violet blossoms. Then, watch for fiddleheads from the Ostrich fern. If I could only recommend a couple spring things that always sell out, it would be ramps and fiddleheads. We have planted a lot of Ostrich ferns off the north side of the house that receive plenty of run off from the spring rains. These ferns love that. However, if you have a quarter acre of perfectly shady, wet area, plant these guys and they will expand and reward you greatly!
Other early spring crops include flowering quince blossoms, cattail shoots and spruce tips, along with concolor (white) fir tips. We sell a number of conifer tip branches that are used by our chefs for making infused oils. Delicious! Norway spruce, the concolor, white pine, eastern juniper and western red cedar are all excellent candidates. We then collect the baby-size cones from all of these too. However, yew berries and branches are toxic, so beware of them. Also, watch for black locust flowers toward the end of May. They can be battered and fried as fritters.
As we move toward early summer, more great perennial crops come into season. Daylily buds and blossoms are edible; so are hollyhock blossoms, lilac flowers and wild bergamot blossoms. Add to that list some elderberry flowers and you can create a summer sampler box of amazing colors and textures. Remember a couple things about chefs: they are visual characters, and as babies always put things in their mouths!
Early summer also brings us nettles, lambsquarter, purslane, rose petals, wood sorrel and mulberries. We also harvest the small peaches as we do thinning each June. Chefs will take the baby peaches and pickle them, like olives. Some chefs are also into baby-size walnuts and other hickory nuts. Harvest them before they really begin to set a shell. We also will harvest nice tender leaves, such as grape, fig and mulberry. These can get used as wrappings for special bites. Watch for serviceberries, gooseberries and raspberries for their fruit.
Moving toward late summer early fall, we harvest blackberries, sunchoke flowers, wild plums and cherries, Hawthorne fruit and smooth or staghorn sumac berries. Later fall brings wild crabapples, rose hips, paw paws and spice bush berries. Throughout the year we can still harvest branches from the conifers, as well as black birch, spice bush, sweet shrub and currants.
I am sure you must be thinking — who eats these things?!? Many of these, we must consider, are ingredients or flavorings. They’re not the main course! Many of us have gotten away from what has for some been considered indigenous foods. We don’t realize how many things we think of as ornamentals or as native plants are actually food. Like I said, this is just a small list. There are a lot more possibilities out there. And this is just what we have on our farm.
Learning about all the possibilities has been an experience too. Then we have to learn how to talk about and present these things to our chef community. We are blessed to have some of the most creative chefs, who are inquisitive and always looking for the next great ingredient. Several of them have come from other parts of the country or have traveled to other places in the world to experience other cultures’ ingredients. This has driven many amazing conversations as to what we might have growing that would be similar to a flavor they are looking to impart on a particular dish.
Next, how in the world do you price all of these crops? That has come as a conversation with a couple of our chefs who have worked with numerous native crops/ingredients. For instance, we harvest a grocery bag of juniper branches each week. We get about $8 per pound for them. These are the tender tips, averaging about a quarter inch in diameter. We try to get juniper branches that have some of the berries too. Scaling this out, we need to plant more junipers! Even on our larger trees, harvesting a grocery bag per week on a mature tree will yield $400 per tree over our 50-week delivery season. That is just for one chef, and we now have multiple chefs on board. Multiply that out to the spruce, fir and western cedars and you can see what the annual income of branches from a planting can achieve. And this takes hardly any time to harvest each week. With careful and thoughtful harvesting, we can allow the tree to regrow each year and rotate our crop trees to harvest.
The same can be said on all these perennial crops. Careful and thoughtful harvest can create a sustainable edible landscape for years. Marketing will be the key — developing personal relationships with like-minded chefs. But understanding that you are known for the “weird stuff” will become your space. I am not so sure that the farmers market is your place, unless you have a very diverse and inquisitive community of foodies. However, finding your niche is where you want to be. It then allows you to keep exploring and bringing new ideas to the chef community and others.
Search out field guides for your area that reference edible wild plants. Learn what is edible and what is not. Learn what they taste like so you can speak about them. Learn the different stages of the plant’s development and at what stages it is most edible or useful. Then research what chefs might be interested in them. Don’t miss talking with the pastry or dessert chefs. Often, they are looking for something super unique to infuse into an ice cream or an oil.
Think outside the box a bit. Look around closely at your property. You have heard it said, “find the hidden farm on your farm.” Take note of what you have and what you could plant that will be there a long while. Use this landscape as a potential way to fill in during the seasons when you’re short on regular vegetable crops. Use this opportunity to create your own ecosystem that brings fun, food and imagination. Then teach it to others!
Marty Travis is a seventh-generation farmer at Spence Farm in Fairbury, Illinois. He runs a co-op that markets the products of over a hundred small farms to chefs in Chicago and throughout the state. Marty is the author of My Farmer, My Customer, published by Acres U.S.A.
