Celery is in your share in early to late fall. The celery we grow is quiet a bit more intense in flavor then what many people are used to. We mainly treat it as an herb.
When celery first appears in your share it may be best used for cooking, or like an herb, as it has not had time to develop the succulence which makes best for raw snacking. Try it out in French or Creole recipes, both cultures using it cooked as a base in many delicious ways, or in a tasty soup. Or toss it in as a garnish for a Bloody Mary. As the season progresses, our celery stalks will take up more and more water, making it better suited for spreading with nut butter and eating raw.
Washed, cleaned, and kept in a bag, celery should store in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator for about a week before losing its crunch.
Celery has gotten a partially unfair reputation as not having many nutrients, as it does have quite a few vitamins and minerals including vitamins A, C, K, calcium as well as lots of usable fiber and almost no calories.
No one knows how long humans have been eating celery, but celery was grown by Persians over four thousand years ago, and was found in the tomb of King Tut. It is believed to have first been harvested from wild plants before cultivation and still grows wild today in temperate Eurasia. Since then, celery has spread across much of the world, and found a central place in many different global cuisines.
Celery is notoriously difficult to grow, and we are in a continuing process of honing our celery growing skills. Unlike most crops it prefers shade to full sun; it also grows very slowly, and needs more water than any other crop we grow on the farm. For this reason, we have found it works best to plant the celery between rows of Brussels sprouts, whose tall leaves provide shade and cool, and irrigate it with both overhead sprinklers and lines of irrigation tape, making our celery bed quite an anomaly on the farm.