How to Eat Seasonally This Spring

What to Eat in Spring

You've heard the idea of eating seasonally, but what actually is in season this spring?

What can you pick out among all the fruits and vegetables in the produce department these days to make sure that you're eating in a way that is good for your body, that ensures you're enjoying the very best-tasting food, that takes care of your local farmers and growers, and that does good for the planet?

I talk a lot about three important things we can do for our communities and the planet:

#1: Eat Seasonally

#2: Shop Locally

#3: Grow Naturally

So, let's talk about what's in season that you can enjoy all spring long. And guess what? It's so much more fun than what you can eat in the winter. I mean, winter is great and all, but now it's spring! We can really dig into some delicious first bites that the garden is going to bring us throughout the whole rest of the year. 

(Prefer to listen? Check out Episode 12 of the Grow Your Self podcast, "Eat This All Spring Long," here.)

Onions Are Perfect Spring Foods

The Allium family, otherwise known as the onion family, includes some of the the first things that can be pulled from the garden when the weather starts to warm up:

• Green onions
• Garlic scapes
• Scallions
• Chives

These are great things to buy from your farmers at the farmers' market, to order in your CSA packages, or even to get from the grocery store. You just want to make sure you're checking the labels. This is something you could definitely be buying locally, so don't buy green onions or anything from this family if it's not grown near you. It'd be such a shame to buy it from far away when you could get tons of it locally and fresh this spring.

If you're growing any of these, now's a great time to cut from them and enjoy them on omelets, salads, and homemade soups to get that first taste of spring.

One of my first successes in gardening was when my mom gave me a pot of garlic chives, and I felt so gourmet, heading out to my porch in the early spring in Nashville to cut some chives for an omelet for my family. If you haven't experienced that yet, you've got to give it a try. Just plant some garlic in a pot, and you'll be able to cut garlic scallions or chives from that pot very quickly in spring.

Eat Seasonally with These Three Superfoods

Plants from the Amaranth family are so, so good for our bodies that I call them superfoods. They include:

• Swiss chard
• Spinach
• Beets

These plants have that red line in their veins that has all these antioxidants and great vitamins and nutrients for our bodies. Nature obviously knows we need this after we've come out of a long, cold, hard winter. 

All of these can be harvested and enjoyed this spring. I think the easiest way to enjoy beets is just by roasting them with a little bit of olive oil and sea salt. I also love making a beet green frittata. And if you're shopping at a farmers' market or buying locally, be on the lookout for these foods; chances are they're going to be locally available.  

Swiss chard is also one of my favorite things to grow in the garden because it's so beautiful. The Amaranth family is so good for you, and if you're not growing any of these plants yet, you definitely should give them a try.

Eating with the Seasons Means Enjoying the Carrot Family Fresh

The Apiaceae family, also known as the carrot family, is widely available during springtime. These vegetables grow well during the cooler parts of the year, and many can keep growing even under frost and light snow. In fact, light frosts make these vegetables taste even sweeter. Carrot family members available in the spring include:

• Celery
• Carrots
• Cilantro
• Parsley
• Dill
• Parsnips
• Fennel

Carrots and parsnips are root crops that are so good for us in the early spring time.

You might associate cilantro with summer since grocery stores love to sell you cilantro right next to tomatoes so you'll crave salsa or something (I am a sucker for salsa), but cilantro and tomatoes don't actually grow together in the same season. Cilantro loves the cool weather, and tomatoes love warm weather. The best time to enjoy cilantro is in the spring when it's fresh from the garden.

How many times have you bought cilantro or parsley, only for it to turn all slimy after like one day in the fridge? That's probably because it's been shipped to you all the way from, say, California. It's so much better to get these herbs in season from a farmer who's growing them near you. The more you can cut down on the travel time of any of these foods, the better the taste will be and the more you'll enjoy them. It will cut down on tons of waste if we buy these things locally, rather than from far away.  

Lettuce Is a Great Food for Seasonal Spring Eating

The Aster, or lettuce, family is a perfect choice for eating all spring long. Lettuces love growing in cool weather, and again, the cooler temps make these greens taste even sweeter. While most of us don't think of eating lettuce till summer, these greens are actually growing best in the cooler temperatures of early and late spring. Here are some of my favorite plants to eat from the lettuce family:

• Butter crunch
• Romaine
• Spring mix
• Artichokes

The Aster family is a little bit more sensitive to frost than things like spinach, beets, and even Swiss chard. That means these softer lettuces are typically available a little bit later in the spring. The less bumpy the leaves, the less tough the leaves, the less the leaves can hold up under more extreme conditions.  

These might be a little challenging for you to grow in your own garden in early spring if you don't have any kind of frost protection, but be on the lookout at the farmers' market for a farmer who's growing them under hoops or in a cold frame or a greenhouse.

As soon as these greens are available from a local grower, grab them because the taste is incomparable to anything you have ever had from a plastic box from the grocery store, believe me.  

Until the temperature rises above 80 degrees, there's a good chance that these lettuces are being grown locally around you, even if not in your own garden. Please prioritize getting these from a local grower rather than from some farmer in California or Arizona (unless you live there, of course).  

Now, I mentioned artichokes are also in this family, and they're a very different kind of plant than the lettuces. Artichokes are a perennial plant that stay in the ground. If you do want to grow artichokes, I recommend growing them outside of your raised-bed kitchen garden.   

Artichokes have these amazing prehistoric-looking leaves that are bumpy and kind of fern-like, and artichokes grow from this one stem. The artichoke really is the seed pod, the fruit of the plant. And these actually come up in the early spring. I planted artichokes throughout my landscape in Houston, and they were some of the most gorgeous things to watch form. I almost didn't want to harvest them. And if you don't harvest them, they will open up into the most beautiful flower—purple and frilly and incredible—and the bees and the butterflies just love it.  

If you've never watched an artichoke grow, I highly recommend the experience. Artichokes can be a little difficult to manage in terms of picking them since you need to do a few steps to soften the petals and make them digestible, but the whole experience is super fun. And if all you've ever had is a jarred or canned artichoke, then it's pretty neat to harvest your own or buy a fresh one from your local farmers.  

Fill Up on Dark Leafy Greens All Spring Long

The Brassica family includes all the dark leafy greens that are so good for our bodies, and they love growing during the coolest parts of spring. Fill up on these dark and leafy greens throughout every month of spring:

• Arugula
• Mustard greens
• Collards
• Florida broadleaf
• Mizuna
• Kale
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Romanesco
• Radishes

Arugula is one of the fastest-growing, easiest greens to grow. If you want to try your hand at growing just a little something this year, you've got to try arugula. Even a brand-new gardener is sure to find success with arugula. Arugula grows really fast from seed, and it tastes so good when you get to harvest it when it's small and eat it right away. Personally, I can't stand the bagged arugula from the grocery store. Even if you just have a little container outside your front door or in a sunny windowsill, I highly recommend trying to grow a little bit of your own.  

Also in this family, are mustards like collards and Florida broadleaf and mizuna, which is a very simple green to grow. Mizuna has these lace-like leaves that have a peppery flavor that adds a little bit of punch to homegrown salads. Mizuna comes in second in terms of the easiest greens to grow from seeds, so start with arugula and then move on to mizuna.  

The third easiest green to grow, I think, is kale. Kale is so fast to grow from seed, and you can harvest it at all different stages. You could eat a little bit when it's little, and you can eat a ton of it when the leaves are large. Kale will conform to whatever kind of space you want to give it.  

These greens are wonderful to buy from local farmers because they can grow a ton of it. And I'm guessing this is a place where they could really make their money because they can harvest from those plants again and again.  

You're going to get so much more nutrition, so much more taste, so much more value, when you buy these greens from your local farmers versus buying them from the grocery store. So, support your farmers if you don't have enough of these greens in your own garden.

Plants like broccoli or cauliflower grow pretty slow (90 days to fully form) and take up a good bit of space in the kitchen garden, so I recommend buying from local farmers versus growing your own, unless you have a lot of space. Try to find farmers who grow them organically so that you can still get the just-harvested flavor without giving up all that space in your garden.

When you head to the farmers' market or buy from a CSA, you might want to prioritize broccoli, cauliflower, and romanesco (those bigger plants) because they've done the hard work, they've given up the big space on their farm to grow that for you. And then you can prioritize the smaller things in your own garden.  

Eat Your Peas This Spring

The Fabaceae family (legumes) is great to fill up on this spring. This family includes:

• Sugar snap peas
• Fava beans
• Snow peas

Peas grow in the spring. The name snow peas fits because they can deal with frost and snow, but all of these have some frost and cold resistance and really thrive during this time period when the temps are between 30 degrees and 75 degrees. These are either going to grow up a trellis for support, or they'll grow in a bush-like form where they're going to grow one to two feet tall and might need a stake or something in the middle of them to keep them going.

Peas are so good for you. They offer some protein and fiber, and can keep you sustained throughout the spring season with more substance and protein then all these greens and leafy things that we're eating.  

Unfortunately, for the majority of sugar snaps we buy from the grocery store, there’s a very high likelihood that those have been sprayed with pesticide. I don't know about you, but it's very hard for me to find organic sugar snaps at my local grocery store. They often are already wrapped up in a plastic pouch. Boo, right? You think you're doing something good, but instead you're eating pesticides. 

But your local farmer is (hopefully) growing more organically and naturally.  

What Fruits Are in Season in Spring?

There aren't a lot of fruits in season at the very beginning of spring, honestly, but you can still fill up on the following:   

• Rhubarb 
• Strawberries
• Blueberries

Rhubarb is technically not a fruit. A lot of people think rhubarb is in the same family as celery, which it's not. It's in the buckwheat family. Rhubarb feels similar to asparagus and artichokes, in that it is a perennial bush. Rhubarb should be grown in the ground, not in your raised beds, because it gets very large. And rhubarb is one of those first things to come up in the spring. It has these beautiful red stalks, and mostly what people do with the red stalks is treat them like a fruit, so they'll make rhubarb cobbler, rhubarb pie, or various other rhubarb stuff with sugar and butter and all those other things that make it taste appetizing.  

So that is one thing you could use as a fruit stand-in, if you will, as we wait for the berries and our favorite fruits to be ready as the season wears on.  

The very first berry, generally, to be available are strawberries, depending on where you live. When I was in Houston, strawberries were available throughout the winter because we had such a mild winter there that farmers could grow them in greenhouses or under covers. I can remember going strawberry picking with my children as early as late February or early March.

Strawberries in cooler parts of the US will be coming up as the weather starts to warm. As soon as local strawberries are available, don't buy them from California or someplace far away from you. Whenever you're entering the season when those things are available locally, you definitely want to prioritize those grown as close to your home as possible. 

Blueberries will come fairly soon after strawberries. We always go to Mississippi at the end of May and the beginning of June to visit my parents and pick blueberries. So that's in a pretty warm climate, but if you're in a colder place, blueberries will be ready by the end of spring.  

Eat with the Season This Spring

There you have it! That is the list of all the wonderful things you can eat this spring! 

Now is the time when there is going to be a lot of local food available to us. If all of us would commit to eating one local meal a week, the amount of fuel that our country uses to truck our food would go down by millions of barrels. It doesn't feel like little things like that add up, but they literally do. 

I challenge you to eat one local meal a week for the entire spring season. Take this list and put together some menus of things that you could enjoy in season and from a local source for one meal a week. I know you can do it!

I hope this inspired you to grow a little bit of this food yourself and look for the freshest, tastiest foods at the farmers' market!