Week #14 is here and a long dry spell with another wave of intense heat has come making it difficult to keep up with watering and irrigation when the temps start to rise as they are this weekend. Hopefully we will get some rain soon. Until then I am working on tilling and planting greens like arugula, mustard, lettuce and radishes for fall shares. This week we have some new crops including arugula, and a planting of kohlrabi has come in. Also an exciting new fruit and specialty pepper find their way to shares this week. Here is this weeks crop list.
Arugula: Fresh salad greens are back in for late summer. This is great as a salad green but also works well in Italian cooking in pasta and on pizza.
Kohlrabi: This bulbous veggie is great roasted with carrots and as as snack raw with salt or cheese.
Jalapeno pepper: These are getting large and nice and hot this year. Just a little flavor and heat for your cooking.
Habanero pepper: These bright orange fruit are colorful but also pack a great flavor with a lot of heat. This variety is slightly tamer then the classic red habanero and much larger in size.
Garlic: Our garlic is good with everything you could create in the kitchen and fully cured and dry with good flavor. No need to refrigerate
Ground cherry: These fruits are amazing and also in the CSA shares for the first time ever! They have a golden husk covering the golden berry inside should be peeled away and the fruit has a flavor similar to cherries and tomatoes combined. If they are green they are unripe and bitter but this dry hot weather lately has made for some very clean golden fruit to enjoy. No need to refrigerate these.
Shishito Pepper: These are a new item for our CSA and in the shares for the first time ever this week. They are best cooked in olive oil and sea salt traditionally until they are browned and blistered, I like to eat them as a side like that. Once in a while one of these will have some heat to it but otherwise they are mild with a great flavor once they are browned. I say the more they brown up the better they taste.
Tomatillo: These should be roasted in the oven around 400 with some garlic and habanero or jalapeño to make a medium or super hot salsa verde. also good as a marinade or sauce on enchiladas, mexican and south american style dishes.
Cherry Tomato: These are still just as juicy and sweet as the first week they started coming in. The plants look healthy,
Tomato: Slicers for your sandwiches, salsa, pasta, sauce, or just plain eaten like an apple with a little salt as one customer told me last week. These are starting to slow down for the season which is why we loaded everyone up on these wonderful summer fruits the last 6-7 weeks but the amount of these coming in now will go down every week in this last quarter of the season.
Sunflower Shoots: This weeks batch looks like it should produce enough for everyone to get sunflower, we may substitute peas if we run low but currently waiting on both batches to come in for harvest over the next few days.
Zucchini or summer squash. The squash and zucchini is slowing down just like the cucumbers which are nearly done for this week also. There should be enough squash and zucchini to go around one more week though.
This weeks list is going out a little late because I was unsure weather we will have enough shisito and debating on what crops to include this week in general but this list should work well for this week. If I do end up changing anything it will be adding radish and sweet peppers to the box and possibly not including tomatillo as they are running lower this week. This week on the farm I also sent in my riding mower for repair and the weedwacker which both have been in and out of service lately so making sure they get fixed by pros this time so I can keep focused on the crops. The amount of employees I have on the farm has gone down recently too and my son had school orientation today and we are getting ready for the school year to begin. Always busy around here but this overlap period of school in the early spring and fall always makes it even harder to have as much time in the field as I like but we are plugging away still daily on the harvesting and packaging of produce. I hope everyone enjoys the veggies! Thanks all. -Kyle
