What’s in the Box: Heirloom tomato, green top onions, summer squash, green garlic, zucchini, savoy cabbage, small english cucumbers, slicing cucumber, parsley, and romaine or butter crunch lettuce head.
What’s going on at the farm:
We have some pretty hot and humid days in the future for us here as we head into the main summer portion of our CSA season. The mosquitos are also out full force to keep us moving quickly in the fields. We have been keeping up on our mowing and weeding to help with air flow and decrease bugs in the field this week as we prepare for some big events for us in the next month including garlic harvest, onion harvest, and planting of many fall crops which will rely on our ability to keep up with the harvesting. The change in weather has some new crops ready to peak this week including one of our personal favorites, tomatoes!
Heirloom tomatoes: these babies are earlier than ever this year, beating our first good harvest last year by one week. We have many varieties to keep it interesting and flavorful. This week you will receive some pink Tomimuro Mucho’s which are a pink japanese tomato with wonderful, sweet, balanced flavor. There may be a few other varieties in your share this week including a small black slicer, and some other pink tomatoes including Pruden’s Purple, and Pink Beauty. Tomato sandwiches, BLT, or caprese are some suggestions, need I say more?
Savoy Cabbage is a great cooking cabbage which lends its fibrous texture well to cabbage rolls, and stands up to cooking better then a green cabbage. We eat it finely shredded and marinated for slaw, or in stir fry too!
Onions are bulbing out quickly in the field with all the rain and irrigation. We will continue to thin our crop this week to provide you with a random selection of onion variety which could be red or yellow with tops on. Cooking with the tops works too, and thinning all of these should make for a good-sized dry onion crop later when we pull them at the end of July.
Zucchini and Summer Squash are very similar in texture, flavor, and cooking requirements. They really go well in everything and we are continuing to pick these guys daily in order to keep them from getting to big on us, at least that is our goal. I love these sautéed with butter and onions with eggs, on pizza, grilled and brushed with herbs and oil, and in pasta, stir fry, or even sliced thinly the long way for a mock lasagna using squash instead of noodles.
Cucumbers love all this humidity and water and our slicers have finally started coming in this week. The bigger slicers have a slightly thicker skin but are still the european type with small seed cavities and smooth skin with no spines. Our baby english cucumbers are still peaking too so we will have some of those sweeter, softer, and smaller ones that you were receiving in there too.
Lettuce is back this week for some salad greens and folks will receive either a butter crunch lettuce or a romaine lettuce head. This crop is not quite as nice as our spring one but we are attempting to keep some salad type greens flowing in the shares. We will be starting more lettuces this week in the field and likely some more pea shoots too to use as salad greens mid-summer when growing lettuce is the most challenging.
Parsley is our herb this week and it is fantastic with just about anything. Remember if you don’t want to use them fresh you can always dry your herbs in a warm spot with good airflow or in a dehydrator.
Lastly, our garlic crop is just about ready for harvest, we have been keeping it well weeded and it looks like an amazing crop this year, our 5th consecutive year of growing our crop from our own stock. We have two types, a hard neck porcelain, and a hard neck purple stripe. The latter is a little spicier but the flavor is truest after curing, which will be weeks down the road. The garlic you receive this week is fresh and can be kept out of the fridge or refrigerated as it is not a dry product yet. This weekend we will harvest the whole crop and set it out to cure, after that you should never refrigerate your garlic.
Some other crops to note that look good and will be coming the next couple weeks include eggplant, green peppers, leeks, hot peppers, cherry tomatoes, and cauliflower.
