Mornings are growing crisp and we did get a touch of frost Thursday night, but we're looking forward to another couple weeks of seasonally warm weather to round out the growing season. It's quite the juxtaposition, anticipating the beets and carrots and spinach that are most delicious when frost-sweetened, while it's still crunch-time for our wholesale hot pepper plantings (which are frost-sensitive and love the heat).
As we're now operating with a skeleton crew of four, we are bringing in Saidang Xiong and his crew once a week; this will be the third year in a row we are partnering with him for harvest help during pepper harvest season. Even with our reduced yields due to hail damage, there's still enough work to keep his crew of 10 busy at least one day a week. Harvest and sorting operations are much slower due to the higher incidence of damaged peppers, but overall, most plantings are faring at least as well as I projected they might after the hail storm.
What else has been going on? Travis has been busy continuing work on a project that we started prior to the hail storm (and then subsequently paused): rebuilding the front porch on the crew house. The existing porch was pretty much falling apart when we bought this house last winter, so we knew we had to either demolish it completely, or save what we could and re-build the rest. I'm excited about the progress!
Notes on items in this week's shares:
- Butternut and delicata squash, like last week, have some hail damage. The wounds are either healed over, or a bit soft but not penetrating deeply into the fruits. The intention is that the blemishes can be removed with a few passes with the peeler. The eating quality is great, but best to eat this week and not keep them in storage.
- Beets are bunched this week, and fairly large in size. They have a mix of red and gold beets. The greens look quite good as regrowth after the previous foliage was damaged by hail, but there will be a few torn leaves. Don't forget to sauté the greens!
- We'll be picking our last planting of fennel this week. The bulbs are a tad smaller than what we've had in prior weeks, but still nice and bulbous. Try this arugula salad recipe with shaved fennel sliced radishes.
- Red radishes are looking gorgeous right now. The flea beetles are mostly gone, so greens are some of the nicest we've seen this year. The roots should be a nice medium-large size, crisp, with some characteristic spice, but not too much.
- A few lucky folks are getting sweet peppers. The bell peppers are some surprise survivors from our open-pollinated sweet pepper variety trial that we had left for dead, but which apparently fared better than our main fields. We'll also be doing one of our last harvests of mini red and orange snacking peppers.
- Lacinato kale, like the radishes, looks quite nice with no flea beetle damage and less caterpillar activity than normal. (Can't promise no one will find a hitchhiker in their bunch, though...) Same stuff that folks received two weeks ago, when the crew mistakenly harvested lacinato instead of green curly kale.
- Arugula will be coming in medium-sized - more substantial than the true baby leaf stuff you get in clamshells at the store, but plenty tender and mild for fresh eating (see the arugula salad recipe). You can lightly sauté it to cut the spice and mellow the flavor if you aren't an arugula enthusiast.
- Tomatoes are on the tail end, but still tasting good. We will be pulling out most of our cherry tomato plants next week, so expect just 1-2 more weeks of cherries. Some of the heirlooms have developed some different coloration than we see in the height of the season, but the flavor is still great. If you get tomatoes that are a bit paler in color, let it ripen for a couple days at room temp.
- We have one more nice flush of mint that will be available this week and next. The weather may well be warm enough to encourage mojitos and sun tea, but it's also great in smoothies, steeped as tea, or in salads like this feta-beet salad.
What's new in upcoming shares? We're excited for abundant salad mix and head lettuce, plus rainbow carrots!
Have a great week!
Dana
