From Spring to Summer
It is, at long last, the Summer Solstice. The ceremonial transition from spring to summer is officially upon us. We really love growing cool season crops and the sad truth of their inviability during the current and upcoming hot weather is unfortunate, but we will do our very best to make the transition to warm season harvests as seamless as possible. It is still true that, during this transitionary period, we must be flexible with providing some crops as available, but we are still pretty happy with what we’ll have to offer this fifth week of our CSA:
Green Cabbage, Red Cabbage, and/or Broccoli (as available), Head Lettuces, Carrots, Swiss Chard and/or Kale, Sweet Peas, Green Peppers, Sage, Cilantro, eggs, and flowers.
Y’all have some homework this week. We didn’t grow snow peas this season (we’re not crazy about them), which are traditionally and easily prepared on the skillet with the whole pods intact. We grew and harvested two varieties of snap peas, aptly named for the inevitable chore of “snapping” them open the pods and scrape out the sweet peas for slow cooking. Our two varieties are “honey snap” golden pea pods as well as the traditional “sugar snap” green peas. While it isn’t unrealistic to prepare them wholly podded, we recommend you spend some time to snap them open and prepare the internal pea seeds independently. We use an instant pot with a 1-3 pea-water (or broth better yet) ratio on high for 15 minutes. There are plenty of ways to steam the peas on the stove top as well, but we have found the instant pot to be a super-versatile and easy tool. Some of the pods seemed a little far-gone to us, but after sufficient preparation, they were sweet and delicious.
We have waist-high sweet corn, cherry tomatoes just starting to show some lightening color, and red okra flirting with flowering. We will keep you informed. We are happy to have summer peppers available but are anxious about getting some corn and tomatoes in the harvest rotation, but patience is a virtue. As we noted last week, some of our tomatoes are struggling to overcome unexpected persistent herbicide residue but we have fresh plants in healthy beds that are good-looking and showing off some fruit. The earlier effected tomatoes will still produce a short-lived crop soon. Butternut squash has sprouted true leaves. We have zucchini and yellow squash germinated and growing quickly. Other winter squashes and melons are in the ground with sufficient rain/moisture in the soil to get them off to a good start. Cucumbers are thriving and flowering in our hoop house and by July, we’ll be starting cool season crops in the nursery all over again including cauliflower and brussel sprouts.
We transplanted our sweet potato “slips” which we received in the mail last week. We don’t feel optimistic. These are a tropical crop and aren’t necessarily simple to cultivate up north, especially by rookies like us. We will do our best considering our inexperience with this crop and, honestly, considering the uninspiring, unforgiving seed crop we received with which to start.
Thanks again to you, our shareholders, for giving us this opportunity to learn and grow. We are excited to see everybody and hear your feedback.
Enjoy your box this week!
Erin & David