Here's how late the growing season is this year: Last Saturday was the first time farmer Moses Momanyi was able to harvest enough produce to set up a stand at the Mill City Farmers Market. And what a nice selection: broccoli and cauliflower, nurtured from raised beds inside a greenhouse, along with green onions, kohlrabi and beautiful teardrop-shaped cabbages.
A third of his stand was devoted to great-looking leafy greens: shiny, crinkled-leafed Swiss chard, purple-streaked Russian kale and collard greens, their soft green-gray leaves traced with an almost reptilian pattern. Turns out that it has been a decent year, weather-wise, for leafy greens. "They're tolerant of the cold," said Momanyi.
The collards are particularly popular at the mini markets that have been sprouting up across Minneapolis. They're an encouraging local-foods success story, pairing growers like Momanyi -- he sells at about six such locations -- with shoppers in fresh-vegetable starved neighborhoods. "The Somalis, they always buy me out," he said with a laugh.
Count him a collards fan, too, preparing them the same way he cooks spinach, by sautéing them with onions and tomatoes and serving them with beef or chicken stew, or over cornmeal porridge.
After several years of juggling agriculture while working as a nurse's aide and laboring in factories, Momanyi, who emigrated from Kenya in 2004, is happy to be able to devote himself to farming full time, cultivating about three dozen crops on five acres near Amery, Wis.
"I want more East Africans to get into farming," he said. One cautionary note, for those who might romanticize rural self-employment: It can't be an accident that the hard-working Momanyi named his business Dawn2Dusk Gardens.
RICK NELSON
Collard greens ($1 per bunch) from Dawn2Dusk Gardens at the Mill City Farmers Market, 2nd Street and Chicago Avenue S., Mpls., www.millcityfarmersmarket.org. Open 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. For a collard greens recipe, go to startribune.com/tabletalk. For a map of Twin Cities metro-area farmers markets, go to startribune.com/taste.
