What’s in the Box: Heirloom and slicing tomatoes (random selection), cauliflower (random selection of green, purple, orange, or white), green pepper, eggplant (random selection), green top sweet onion, summer squash, zucchini, mini and full size english cucumbers, green garlic, serrano chile pepper, celery, and basil.
What’s going on at the farm: This last week we harvested all of our garlic and cleaned, bundled and set it out for curing. Our garlic haul is beautiful this year and probably the nicest we’ve had in terms of size and overall quality. It took 6 people 6 hours to dig out over 3,500 bulbs by lifting them individually with a shovel or fork. We did it all through 93 degree heat which felt like over 100 with the humidity but when the veggies are ready they are ready and we only had a small window of time to complete the task. After a couple weeks we will then clip the tops off each bulb and clean them up a bit more for storage, seed stock, and of course for your CSA shares! This will make room for the onion harvests that will be coming over the next four weeks. We have two types of garlic. The first is a white porcelain hard neck called german extra hardy which has a white wrapper and 4-6 large cloves making it easy to clean. The other is a purple striped hard neck called asian tempest which is a bit spicier and has purple streaking through the outer wrapper. Both of them store well on the counter or any room temp shady spot. Do not refrigerate your garlic unless it is fresh dried garlic should not be refrigerated as there is no need and this could force it to sprout. Our garlic area will soon be seeded right into salad greens and other crops for fall shares if I can find some time between harvests. We are harvesting every day now on many crops and all that weeding we were doing the last month has made for easy picking and clean fields to work in. Lots of exciting crops are finally yielding heavily including green peppers which i’m sure your familiar with and tomatoes which is my personal favorite. Eggplants is in too and I love to cook slices of them fried in olive oil and seasoned with my favorite seasonings and then put it on bread with a slice of fresh tomato, melted cheese, and basil. Plenty of cucumbers and summer squash still coming in too and these versatile veggies are great for so many dishes they are too numerous to mention. We love the cucumbers just sliced up with salt as an easy snack but they are great for juicing, pickling, and of course sandwiches and salads. We have a large variety of both sweet and hot peppers coming this year but The hot pepper for this week is serrano which is a medium long blunt green chile with nice flavor and medium heat. They are versatile and great for spicing up any recipe. Of course the heat is in the seeds on most hot peppers so you can make them more mild by carefully removing the majority or all of the seeds. Until next week then, enjoy the veggies and we will keep on harvesting, cleaning, planting, and weeding!
