Red Ripe, flavorful, heirloom tomatoes
We’ve been doing a fair bit of complaining about our tomatoes this season. For many reasons, mentioned in previous email updates, our field tomatoes have been a struggle, and we have learned an awful lot. The field plants are kind of ugly and they bear some funky fruit, but you’ll receive some real juicy beauties in your CSA boxes this week nevertheless. We are confident and relieved that there will be many more to come.
For our eleventh CSA box this season, we have more fresh summer vegetables to share:
Cherry Tomatoes and Heirloom Tomatoes (Moskovich and Martha Washington), Zucchini and Yellow Squash, Bush Beans, Mild Peppers, Hot Peppers, Cucumbers, Onions, Eggs, and Flowers.
Our wild blackberry patches continue to produce but this week, we were unable to dedicate the time needed to collect enough for all our shareholders. For our farm pick up folks or any other farm visitors, if you’re interested, ask Erin to point you in the right direction to explore and gather up some handfuls yourselves. Dress accordingly because it gets thorny!
We’ve really enjoyed seeing how everyone has been using their cucumbers and squash. Keep sharing your pickle recipes, breads, stir fry’s, and casseroles! If you’re getting more than you need or more than you have time to preserve (a good problem), share some of your surplus with you friends and neighbors. It’s feast season!
For many reasons, we feel less optimistic about our sweet corn crop week by week. Concerning this particular crop, we’ve had no shortage of both bad luck and unforced errors. We had mentioned weeks back that much of the stand had been toppled in a storm, only to miraculously rise back up and restore some hope. Now we feel less hopeful.
We concluded early in the season that fencing in our operation in an effective way wouldn’t be realistic this season. This was admittedly risky, but we were confident that critters would find enough food in our wild landscape to be less interested in our cultivated, pooch-patrolled gardens. We lucked out this spring and managed to avoid many critter issues. But it seems that as soon as our tired stand of maize finally produced some of the sweetest grain for miles around, the critters couldn’t resist.
So now, after the crop got knocked down, the ears struggle to fill to an adequate size, and we’re sharing the field with some inconsiderate wildlife. They’ve done some damage. Again, hard lessons learned here. Unfortunately, at this point, we’re fairly confident we won’t have a surplus to bring to any market, but we’ll still hold out hope that we will have something to give to our shareholders if/when the time is right.
Thus far, we’ve been providing fresh onions each week, often pulled and peeled the morning of delivery. As we are continuing to prepare our gardens for late summer/fall crops and as the sun continues to shine with any precipitation remaining absent from forecasts, we decided to pull the rest of our onion crop and cure it in the sun for long term storage. The end product is a fully-skinned, shelf stable onion, typical in grocery stores. They won’t need to be refrigerated and ought to last a long long time.
We have microgreen trays cooking in the nursery as well as fall garden seedlings. If all goes well, we ought to have some fresh micros to include in our boxes next week. Just when it’s really starting to feel like peak summer, cool season crops are back on the agenda.
Keeping up with egg production continues to be a challenge. We hope to get everyone what they need this week, but we’ll be bringing a few new laying hens to the farm on Monday to help keep our numbers up.
We’re nearing the halfway point of this summer’s CSA! We are so appreciative of everyone’s support and participation. Happy August!
Erin & David
