- Bell Peppers
- Shallots
- Green Beans
- Lettuce
- Sweet Corn*
- Carrots
- Garlic Bulb
- Fresh Basil (off-farm pickup sites only)
- Crimini Mushrooms*
This Week's Fruit Share:
- Peaches
- Mix of Red &Yellow Plums
- Blueberries
Notes from the Farm Kitchen
The recent heat is really pushing along our mid-summer heat-loving crops. The pepper plants are coming along beautifully and are loaded with beautiful green fruits, many of which are still too small to harvest. As the weeks go by, these smaller green peppers will continue to grow bigger and many of them will eventually turn from green to either yellow, orange or red. The fact that green peppers are simply immature colored peppers is one of those interesting things I never stopped to consider before I started farming. Another curious thing about sweet peppers is that certain varieties never even have a green stage. For example, we grow a variety called Islander that starts out purple in its immature stage and slowly matures to a bright orange. Pretty cool, huh? Anyway, we harvested our first peppers last week and will continue to harvest them steadily until frost. Eventually there may be a week when you'll receive enough peppers all at once to do a stuffed pepper recipe. In the meantime, you can enjoy this week's two peppers in myriad other ways, including vegetable salads, casseroles, omlets, pasta sauces, etc.
Mark Twain once advised his readers to check the weather forecast before praying for rain. I'm afraid we didn't heed that sage advice this past week. During weeks of discouraging droughty conditions, I'd been doing nothing but praying for a little bit of much-needed rain. On Thursday night we were taken by surprise by a drenching rain that didn't let up until the gauge nailed to the clothesline indicated over 3 inches. The next night's rain brought the total amount to about 5 inches. That's about 4 inches more than we needed! All that rain created pools of standing water in a couple of low-lying fields. The crops in those areas probably will not make it. Fortunately, most fields were able to absorb all the water without any lasting negative impact. Our third planting of broccoli and cabbage will certainly benefit in both taste and texture from the moisture. So will our second planting of carrots.
Here's a shot of this week's carrots moments after being harvested. I think they look lovely even before they've been washed, don't you?
By now our crew members are experts at negotiating muddy field roads and walkways as they go about their daily routine. Here Kate and Nadia harvest carrots for Wednesday's delivery. With respect to carrots and most other vegetable crops, all the mud does not prevent our ability to harvest. It merely complicates the task. Onion harvest, however, is a different matter. In a typical year, mid to late-July is the time for harvesting all of the shallots and the storage onions. Ideally, the onions should come out of the field fairly dry and be spread out in the greenhouse until they are fully cured. This period of dry curing allows them to store without going bad. We were all set to start harvesting shallots and onions at the end of last week, but it looks like we'll have to hold off harvesting most of them until things dry out. This week we pulled out just enough shallots to give everybody about a pint's worth. Shallots are closely related to onions, but often have a sweeter, richer flavor that is very popular with chefs and home cooks alike. This particular variety of shallot is a nice round, red variety which differs in appearance from the elongated French shallots that you may be familiar with. I think you'll find that they have great flavor and can be just as versatile as common bulb onions.
We're still waiting eagerly (and somewhat impatiently) for our own sweet corn plantings to mature. This week's corn (not organic) is from Joe Skelly and family who farm near Janesville. This is the first time we've tried Joe's corn. It came highly recommended by Brad Paulson, another vegetable farming friend of ours in Wisconsin. I often feel fortunate to be in this line of work because of the talented and kind-hearted farmers we get to meet. Brad has been helping us as we begin the process of transitioning some farm property we own in Wisconsin from conventional practices to organic certification. I'll write more about that process in a future newsletter.
While I'm on the subject of talented farmers, I want to acknowledge the contributions of two other producers to this week's share. Eric Rose of River Valley Mushrooms, has provided us with some beautiful criminis this week. Eric has been growing totally chemical-free mushrooms for many years and recently obtained organic certification. Also, Paul Ehrhardt and Kay Jensen of JenEhr Family Farm contributed some of their organic green beans. We are finished picking from our first planting of beans and just starting to pick from the second planting, so about half of you will recieve green beans from our farm and about half will receive beans from JenEhr Farm.
This Week's Recipes
Next week's vegetable harvest (our best guess)... green beans, beets, curly kale, basil, peaches, sweet corn, tomatillos, peppers, green onions, cucumbers and more!
