Carmine Splendor
Happy 4th of July!
It’s hard for us to believe it’s already July. The holiday has really sneaked up on us. We hope our friends are having a great holiday weekend enjoying good company and all of this pleasant, agreeable weather! We certainly have been.
This is a famous benchmark weekend for farmers to confirm that they are on track and their corn crop is in fact “knee high by the fourth of July.” We’ve got an early crop at chest height, sprouting flowering tassles, indicating that we’ll likey have just under three weeks until sweet corn harvesting begins. No doubt it looks like a summer garden around here!
This is an exciting week of the summer as it will be our first distribution of tomatoes! This week, we’ll have Sun Gold and Supersweet cherry tomatoes at various stages of ripening for you to use in your salads and dishes. Because it’s mixed batch, don’t judge their ripeness on color alone. Leave them on the counter and when they look deep golden or orange (Sun Gold), or a standard full red ripe (Supersweet), give them a gentle squeeze and if they have some decent give to them, they’re definitely ready. Don’t be too concerned if they end up overripening and splitting on the counter (we’ll be holding on to the overripe vine-split ones), just eat them up right away.
This is an exciting week of the summer as it will be our first distribution of tomatoes! This week, we’ll have Sun Gold and Supersweet cherry tomatoes at various stages of ripening for you to use in your salads and dishes. Because it’s mixed batch, don’t judge their ripeness on color alone. Leave them on the counter and when they look deep golden or orange (Sun Gold), or a standard full red ripe (Supersweet), give them a gentle squeeze and if they have some decent give to them, they’re definitely ready. Don’t be too concerned if they end up overripening and splitting on the counter (we’ll be holding on to the overripe vine-split ones), just eat them up right away.
Our Wednesday morning harvest last week was a tricky one, with scattered thunderstorms erratically passing over the farm. It forced us to prioritize our harvest which meant our Wednesday shareholders missed out on herbs. We apologize and we’ll make up for it in your Week 7 boxes.
Our spring garden is continuing to thin as we wrap up our broccoli harvest, are left with only small cabbage heads, squeeze out all we can from our mixed greens successions, clear up the beet bed, and dig up our potato rows a few feet at a time. Our vegetable production is divided into three blocks and while block one is slowing down, the second and third blocks are only just getting started.
Our summer bean rows are flowering beautifully consisting of a standard green string bean variety, a purple bush variety, and our favorite bean cultivar “dragon tongue.” When selecting varieties for a particular crop, we are always drawn to colorful cultivars that make for a diverse, vivid plate and a vibrant diet. In reality, all the beans turn green when you heat them up on the skillet, but it’s fun regardless and it certainly doesn’t hurt, while harvesting, to have all those fancy flashy bean pods pop out from the collage of green leaves and stems from where they loosely hang.
Another new summer vegetable picking up the pace is our “Carmine Splendor” heirloom Okra crop. Like the beans, we were drawn to this cultivar for its uniquely deep crimson fruit. Okra is a hard crop to keep up with, also like beans, as the plants really put out a lot of fruit quickly and persistently. The pods are best pinky-sized and tender but quickly grow to long, woody cones as soon as you look away. They are fun to harvest and the plants, impressively, can grow as tall as six feet. We recently watched “High on the Hog” on Netflix (recommended), a fascinating doc which highlights the origins of Okra and its significance to traditional West African diets and subsequently, modern African American cuisine.
We’ve started pulling nice new cucumber fruits and will start getting them out to our shareholders once we reach an appropriate bounty. We have both smooth fat pickle varieties and skinnier, bumpier, pricklier slicing cukes. We’re excited to share these versatile fruits and see what kind of pickles, relishes, and salads y’all come up with.
Jalapeno and Anaheim peppers are coming soon. We’ve had a few early jalapenos with excellent flavor and really manageable heat. We’re impressed and excited to start delivering handfuls.
We hope you’ve had a great weekend and we’ll look forward to seeing everyone again this week. Keep sharing how you’re incorporating our produce into your snacks and meals!
Erin & David