How Portland learned to eat green all winter

Lily Roby

PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) — Randy Long tends to his crops under a slate-gray sky. It’s mid-winter — a dreary time in Oregon — but as a crisp gale cuts across his field, the farmer treads the muddy rows, gently running his thumbs over the ridges of each baby kale leaf and inspecting the growth of every tiny broccoli bud.

Long’s plants are thriving, and his farm is something of a winter oasis. When Courthouse News visited in early January, the acreage abounded with thick leaves and striking, verdant shades of green.

Farmers’ markets and local food systems have boomed across the U.S. in recent decades, driven by consumer interest in fresh, minimally processed foods and regional agriculture. And yet winter remains a season of reduced freshness in many parts of the country.

Not so in Portland, where farmers’ markets remain open year-round and small farms continue producing through rainy but mild winters. Sometimes called the “locavore” or “farm-to-table” movement, it’s a trend with early roots here.

All through the season, lesser-known winter vegetables appear on store shelves in deep green, pink and burgundy hues.

It all starts with farms like this one, which offers a glimpse at what it takes to grow through winter.

Long started Cohesive Farms a little more than a year ago. Located in the Portland suburb of Gresham, the small farm operates on land leased through the East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District’s Headwaters Farm program, an incubator that connects beginning farmers with land, tools and infrastructure.

He grew up on a sweet corn farm in upstate New York, where winter meant feet of snow that entirely shut down operations.

He spent nearly a decade in academia studying conservation and plant physiology, earning his doctorate from University of California, Santa Barbara before moving to Oregon. Now a biology professor at Lewis & Clark College, he balances teaching with his true passion, agriculture.

This winter, Long’s fields and high tunnels are filled with brassicas like cabbage and broccoli, as well as with fava beans and a range of leafy greens.

Long says crops like these, grown in the winter season, can actually taste sweeter than their summer counterparts.

“As temperatures drop, growth slows down — but the plants are still making sugars,” he explains as he walks through a high tunnel, a plastic-covered structure that creates a sheltered and naturally warmer environment, like a greenhouse. “These sugars peak in the winter, but there’s nowhere for them to go, so they get put into a kind of storage until spring comes around.”

The biggest obstacle to winter growing in the Portland area isn’t temperature, Long says, but light.

While winters here are mild, the city sits far enough north that daylight gets scarce. Around the winter solstice, Portland receives fewer than nine hours of daylight, with the sun rising around 8 a.m. and setting just after 4 p.m.

Once day lengths drop below ten hours, plant growth slows dramatically. Long points to lettuce planted outdoors just weeks apart, and the difference is obvious: The earlier plantings are drastically larger and more robust.

The Pacific Northwest’s steady rain can present another challenge. To manage waterlogging and mud, Long relies on raised beds, plastic coverings and high tunnels to give his plant babies warmth and shelter.

Surprisingly, snow can be a boon. A light layer insulates tender young plants, holding them at a crisp 30 degrees and protecting them from wind.

Growing food is only half the equation. After harvesting his winter bounty, Long then has to get his produce into the bellies of customers.

On Saturdays, he sells produce at the Portland State University Farmers’ market, a year-round, multiblock market downtown. Other winter harvests can be found at neighborhood grocers and co-ops — another important piece of the local winter-produce supply chain, and one that helps bridge the gap between farm and table.

As plants become harder to grow in the winter, consumer demand for greens actually increases, said Ryan Gaughan, produce buyer and collective manager at the People’s Food Co-Op in Southeast Portland. Open since the 1970s, the market has long played an important role in getting locally grown fruits and vegetables to consumers.

“It’s a very interesting phenomenon,” Gaughan said. “In summer, there are so many places people can get lettuces and similar produce.” With lots of options for fresh veggies, “there’s this abundance thing that happens.” Then the days get shorter and colder, and customers flock to People’s Food Co-op looking for locally sourced kale, arugula and lettuce.

To keep up with demand and because greens are highly perishable, the store relies on frequent, sometimes daily, deliveries through the winter months. Contrast that to the bagged greens seen at most grocery stores, which are harvested far away and long before they reach shelves, then typically packed with special gases to keep them fresher for longer.

By choosing local and seasonal crops, consumers play an important role in keeping farms like Long’s going through the lean months, Gaughan said.

“You’re enabling the farm to have some measure of income during a time of year when they otherwise wouldn’t,” he said enthusiastically as customers buzzed about the co-op. “Just today, we got a delivery of celery from a farm that’s located here in the Willamette Valley.”

Another factor in Portland’s winter cornucopia is the growing popularity of bitter winter greens, a class of acquired-taste vegetables that thrive in cold weather. They’ve long been celebrated in Italian cuisine but are only recently finding a place at American tables.

Few have done more to expand their popularity than Lane Selman, a professor at Oregon State University and founder of the Culinary Breeding Network. Selman grew up in agriculture, in a family that was influential in the Florida citrus industry. Over time, she’s carved out a niche at the intersection of farming, research and food culture, helping set a trend in agriculture that treats flavor as a top priority.

The Culinary Breeding Network started with a simple problem.

“We didn’t have a very fleshed-out way of evaluating taste,” Selman said. Years ago, her first “tasting party” brought together Pacific Northwest farmers and chefs to try a variety of sweet peppers that had been selected through years of diligent natural breeding.

The tasting was groundbreaking: Chefs brought perspectives plant breeders hadn’t considered, including texture, bitterness, sweetness and even how easily the peppers could be cut during a busy service.

“I knew how they performed in the field,” Selman said of the peppers, “but if they performed great but didn’t taste good or vice versa, did it even matter?”

Conventional agriculture prioritizes uniformity and shelf life over flavor, Selman said — for example, with tomatoes that are bred to withstand shipping but taste less sweet. She thinks seed monopolies like Monsanto have also taken away choice and agency from farmers, discouraging them (and in some cases, outright forbidding them) from trying out new varieties.

Through public events like Southeast Portland’s Tomato Festival and the Sagra del Radicchio festival, Selman introduces curious eaters to fruits and vegetables they may have never tried before. Attendees taste-test veggies and meet the growers and breeders — or as Selman likes to call them, the “wizards behind the curtain.”

“The ultimate goal is to change what mainstream Americans are eating, expose them to produce that’s better [for] them and support farmers along the way,” she said. “We have the ability to eat year-round here, but these vegetables are just less appreciated.”

Symbolizing Selman’s passion for winter vegetables is the humble radicchio, a member of the endive family known for its bitter taste and red-and-white cabbage-like heads.

This winter green inspired Selman to start the Gusto Italiano Project, which imports seeds from Italy for farmers in the United States.

Some of the radicchio grown with those seeds ultimately ends up at Rubinette Produce Market, part of the Providore Fine Foods gourmet grocery store in Northeast Portland. Founded a decade ago by owner and produce fanatic Josh Alsberg, Rubinette abounds in the colder months with vibrant winter produce: watercress, hard squash, mâche, celeriac, rutabaga, four kinds of daikon radish, carrots and apples. There’s also Satsuma oranges and Meyer lemons, which (fun fact!) are both winter fruits.

“Everybody knows the red, round radicchio,” Alsberg said, passion evident in his voice. “There are a dozen or so varieties and associated leafy greens that we bring in throughout the wintertime, with regional names like Castelfranco and Lusia.”

Alsberg paused to give directions to an employee who was stocking shelves before returning to what he does best: talking produce.

“These are very pretty, speckled green and red,” he said of the Italian greens. “One is called Rosalba and it’s bright pink. It’s a showstopper.”

Rubinette’s customers include not only enthusiastic home cooks but some of Portland’s most celebrated chefs, including those from James Beard Award-nominated restaurants like Han Oak, Le Pigeon and Coquine.

While local produce may come at a higher price, Alsberg believes the value is evident in its flavor, nutrition and transparency. He says his staff can happily answer any questions visitors have about the produce, such as the farms each item comes from and their labor practices.

Asked how to use all this winter produce, Alsberg doesn’t hesitate to share recipes.

He likes to make a breakfast salad with radicchio, chicory and other greens. He tops that with a homemade mustard-based salad dressing, poached eggs, mellow gold grapefruit, watermelon radishes and any other seasonal goodies he might have on hand.

It’s colorful, punchy, bitter and bright, evidence that winter doesn’t have to be a time of scarcity or limitation. It’s also a testament to the Pacific Northwest’s bounty and its many small farms.

“There’s so many great growers in the Northwest,” Alsberg said. His shop is “really a labor of love.”