Hi Farm Friends! It's time to customize your share for next week! You have until Sunday at midnight to do so. Tomatoes are still plentiful, more cherry tomatoes available this week than last week, and we have ripening peppers now! We also have the first of our lunchbox peppers and ground cherries!
On The Farm
This time of year it is so delightful to go into the field and grab some cucumbers and fresh tomatoes and peppers and then go home and make a salad. I love going to the grocery store and snickering about how my cart is mainly full of chips... Hahaha!
Every week we have a meeting to discuss the plan for the week and then we write a big to-do list on the board and try to get as much of it done as possible. This week during our meeting Jonathon suggested we plant salad mix at the same time because why waste time? Fortunately all our salad mix is planted and the current planting is growing well and we weeded it and we should have more mix again next week.
This week we finished off our plantings so we are all caught up now except for our second planting of Rainbow Chard which we are awaiting compost for. The dry weather let us get some bed prep done and the carrots planted in the ground - we tried some new techniques for tackling the weed pressure on carrots so fingers crossed that it worked!
In the next 1-2 weeks we will be getting our fall cabbages, broccoli, bok choy, kohlrabi, and beets into the ground.
We even got a bit of extra time this week to work installing the exhaust fans in our two big greenhouses! This should help with tomato, cucumber, and pepper production because they don't like to get too hot and will drop their flowers.
Oh yes, we also began hunting our first hornworms! These scary-looking caterpillars like to munch on tomatoes and tomato leaves and generally leave all staff with nightmares.. We deal with them by picking them up and putting them in a bucket to feed to our chickens.
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Tip of the Week: A Quick Salad Without Greens
We’re low on salad mix again this week, so try this instead: slice up tomatoes into wedges and add in some of the following, chopped (whatever you have): onions, peppers, cucumbers. Toss with olive oil, salt, a squeeze of lemon juice. There you go! You’ve got yourself a fine salad. I like to add olives and feta too.
What’s Fresh This Week
It’s tomato season, so get your tomato on folks! We also have a growing number of peppers each week, hooray! Zucchini is winding down, beans are coming along slowly, cucumbers are still pumping, amazingly! We’ve got some nice beets this week too.
From Pfenning’s Organics we have cauliflower, spinach, fresh onions AND CARROTS (because you love carrots and our carrots won’t be ready for about 90 days, ha ha ha).
We’ve got a few new items coming along which you may have the chance to add to your share either this week or an upcoming week soon. I’ll talk about a few of them here:
Ground Cherries
When I discovered these I fell in love and since they didn’t turn out too well last year I am so happy to have them back. We only have 25 pints so not enough to go around, but I left extra available for swapping. They are the closest thing to fruit that we grow. Underneath the papery husk is a little orange berry that pops in your mouth with a sweet and slightly savoury burst of flavour. Rosemary went and harvested a bunch of these today all on her own, even though we barely had any last year, she remembers how much she loves them.
Shishito Peppers
I wrote about this already but you really have to give them a try, they are a fun appetizer or snack, not hot at all. Here’s a video to show you how to cook them. The general reaction of people who finally try them: “Oh, wow, those were so good!”
Peppers
Just a quick note about our peppers, we grow both Bell peppers and Italian Shepherd Peppers. We don’t distinguish between the two when packing orders, because neither one in our humble opinion is better than the other. The shepherd peppers are definitely less common around these parts, but they have become my favourite because they are super sweet and juicy and easier to work with since their small seed cavity is mostly at the top. If you’re going to grill or stuff a pepper, these are the best choice. Also we harvest some peppers as they are beginning to ripen, so you might see a mix of green and other colours. All peppers start off green and then ripen to a variety of colours depending on the pepper variety.
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That's it for this week! Enjoy the sunshine and eat well.
Your farmer,
Kim
