(CSA Newsletter: Week 30)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Sweet corn — More delicious sweet corn! It’s hard to beat a lightly cooked fresh ear of sweet corn, buttered and salted … yum.
- Tomatoes — We’ve been especially enjoying this year’s tomatoes. We’ve seen a real positive shift in the quality, which we attribute to the many changes we’ve made this year. We’re growing different varieties (all open-pollinated types) in a permanent house (stronger, so there’s no more drooping tomato trellises). We’re also watering differently, which we think is making for more consistent irrigation. And, we’re overall growing fewer plants, which allows us to spend more time tending to each. You’d hardly know we have fewer plants, because we’re harvesting more tomatoes that meet our highest expectations for consistently firm texture when ripe and rich delicious flavor. We hope you’ve been enjoying them too!
- Eggplant — Need some ideas? Check out the eggplant recipes in this week’s newsletter.
- Cucumbers or zucchini/summer squash
- Broccoli — Our fall broccoli planting is just coming on! Clearly we’re creeping past the peak of summer and starting the long slow slide into autumn.
- Romaine lettuce — Crisp, watery, sweet — a good summer Romaine lettuce is just the thing for making the best Caesar salad!
- Beets — Cook the greens and toss with pasta; steam the beets and serve on salad; or do something else entirely!
- Carrots
- “Torpedo” onions — So named for their long shape, “torpedo” onions are some of our absolute favorites. They’re sweet enough to eat raw, but flavorful enough for cooking with. Some describe them as being similar to a very large, sweet shallot.
The cool trend of summer has continued through to the end of August. Although we had a few hot days in the last few weeks, each heat spell didn’t last long and was quickly followed by much cooler temps.
This last week was no exception to this pattern, as we discovered during our varied and busy week of outdoor activities.
Casey and I took a day off our farm on Wednesday to visit our friends at Gathering Together Farm (GTF) and talk about some seed trials we’re participating in along with many other farms in the northern parts of the country (meanwhile, our valiant employees Jeff and Lucy stayed behind to weed!).
While at GTF, we ate some good food (some of their famous potato donuts, a delicious farm lunch, and nine different varieties of sweet corn), visited with farmer friends from around the state, and spent a lot of time baking and sweating while looking at different variety trials in the fields.
It was hot — probably one of the hottest days of the year — but everyone was having too good of a time to be terribly bothered by the heat. I think that all of us farmers had a sense that Wednesday was one of the last good scorching days we’d have this year — if not the last really hot day.
Over lunch, we discussed the season so far. Typical of farmers, we talked about all the rough stuff: failed spring crops, equipment disasters, planting mishaps … and, of course, we all talked about how we’re crossing our fingers for an Indian summer so we can ripen our winter squash and mature our onions.
Sure enough, the next day the temperatures dropped back down to comfortably warm, and by Saturday the mornings were downright chilly again. On Saturday, Casey and I hiked at Table Rock, and we both wore long-sleeves and warm hats for the entire eight-mile hike!
It feels as though we’ve crossed the threshold from summer’s peak to the true beginning of fall. Fall usually has a long slow arrival that overlaps with the final last hoorah in the fields — as temperatures fall and days shorten, the fields produce a glut of summer vegetables.
Our work is about to make the shift to ‘prepare for fall’ activities as well. This week Casey will be sowing our over-wintering onions, and he and Jeff will begin some of our big storage veggie harvests: pulling some of the earlier onions to cure, and digging early potatoes and beets. Casey has also begun harvesting and cleaning some of our seed crops. This week he cleaned an over-wintering broccoli seed crop, which we are excited to sow immediately again this fall.
But, as much as there is some inherent sadness involved with reaching and passing summer’s peak, we love this interim season between the hot summer weather and when the fall rains arrive. The farm is just so lovely this time of year — it’s comfortable to be outside; the harvest work is fun and fulfilling; and everything is beautiful.
Right now, we have happy sunflowers blooming alongside calendula in our ‘home garden’ plot, and the acre of phacelia cover crop that Casey sowed last month is starting to flower. Phacelia is a blooming crop (also known as ‘Bee Friend’) that produces long-lasting periwinkle flowers that unfold over several weeks to reveal more and more purple petals and stamen after stamen after stamen loaded with pollen. In the warm afternoons, the field is buzzing with thousands of bees!
And, Rusty is delightful these days too. He is truly becoming a little person, and we love watching him interact with the fruits of the summer. He can eat a handful of cherry tomatoes, one after another. And, he has discovered that plums are very good things to eat. Our life has become quite a bit messier as a result of his love for good fruits and vegetables, but that’s a small price to pay for the pure joy of watching him smile after picking a plum out of a harvest bucket and taking a big bite.
This time of year, we feel like we are sucking the marrow out of summer, savoring every last minute of this waning season. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
