(CSA Newsletter: Summer Week 9)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
In the last week, we’ve been pushing pretty hard out here: putting in some long work sessions to get big projects finished. Last Friday, we planted out another round of fall & winter vegetables: 10 beds total of cabbages, chicories, & kale. And, today, Monday, we began the long work of harvesting our onions to dry for fall & winter storage. It turns out that we have a lot of onions. We only pulled two of seven onion beds today, and already the area under our walnut tree is filling up with onion drying racks.
Preparing for fall and winter seasons has certainly required a mental shift in the way we go about this farming business. On one hand, part of why we want to extend the season is the spread out our labor and income over the entire year, rather than cramming every thing into a four-month period the way many farms do. However, the natural flux of the seasons requires us to put a lot of planning, planting & harvesting in now — amidst high season summer harvests — for much later months. So, for example, today we began the day by harvesting almost 300 pounds of tomatoes — summer at its best — and ended it with the onion pulling — winter food.
So far, we enjoy the constant balancing act between attending to today’s harvest and preparing for harvests months away. When we give people tours of the farm these days, we’re struck by how much our fields still resemble an early spring farm scene: between our gangly rows of over-grown summer squash & other summer items, we have freshly tilled and planted rows of baby lettuces, cabbages, and carrots. And, now that we’re moving towards being a year-round CSA, we expect our farm will almost always look that way: older plantings next to young plantings. Our field will never be empty again. Weird thought.
That’s also why we’re planning to work different ‘sides’ of our large open field each year for the vegetable garden. Since we will be over-wintering so many beds, it would be difficult in the spring to find open beds for new plantings. Instead, we’ll work up the adjacent field and replace the over-wintered items with cover crop as they come out. Again, just another way we’re learning to look at farming differently these days.
Speaking of year-round growing & eating, thanks to everyone who responded to our request for a winter pick-up site. We now have many great options to choose from. We’re thinking about moving the fall season to the winter site as well, so that we can avoid being outside in the cold and dark this November & December. We’ll let you know the details about the new fall/winter pick-up site soon — either way, it will be very close to the current location at First Baptist.
Also, thanks to folks who reached out to us regarding the gravel quarry scare. We still don’t have any further verification of the rumor, and we don’t want to make any rash conclusions … but we are doing our homework on the issue, since we’re sure it will come up eventually on the island. We’ll keep you all posted.
In the meantime, it is very much still summer, as you can see in this week’s tomato-filled share. We know that school starts very soon, and fall will follow closely behind, but today we relished in a beautiful warm sunny August day. We hope you too enjoy these last few weeks of summer, and enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers,
Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics
What is an ‘heirloom’ tomato, anyway?
‘Heirloom’ is a word seed companies use to distinguish vegetable varieties that have been in cultivation for over 50 years. Generally speaking, they are varieties preserved by amateur growers rather than seed researchers or universities, and as such they often have less commercially-oriented attributes. For example, they may not have high yields but might have a superb off-beat flavor.
Tomatoes are a gold mine for heirloom vegetable lovers, since there are so many to choose from. We love heirloom tomatoes because they offer colors, textures, shapes, and flavors not generally seen in the standard commercial red slicers. On the flip side, heirloom tomatoes are often the least reliable producers — but we’ve apparently done something right this year, because we have tons!
We grow four different heirloom tomatoes, all of which you’ll probably have sampled by now … Striped German: a yellow & orange behemoth with beautiful marbling inside. Brandywine: the most famous heirloom tomato — pink variegation with a perfect balance of sweet & acidic flavors. Black from Tula & Black Krim: two versions of the classic ‘black sea’ heirloom tomatoes — both feature dark purple highlights & flavors verging on savory.
How to best enjoy heirloom tomatoes? Any way you want! We love to eat them as a salad on their own by simply slicing, arranging on a plate and drizzling with balsamic (& a sprinkle of salt). A garnish of fresh goat cheese and/or basil is also lovely.
However, we also enjoy making simple pasta sauces by chopping & stewing in a shallow pan just before a meal — the freshness of the tomatoes comes through in the flavor. (We’re so lazy most of the time that we don’t even peel the tomatoes! And it’s still tasty!)
And, we’ve also been eating some fresh simple salsas lately. We simply hand-chop tomatoes, peppers, and sweet onions; mix them together with a little salt & pepper; and then enjoy with chips & on our quesadillas.
Either way, we hope you enjoy this week’s tomato abundance … we plan to eat tomatoes until we’re sick. But if all else fails and you feel stymied, you can always freeze whole tomatoes in freezer bags. Simply core first, and then slip into a bag whole! They’re great all winter long in soups, sauces, etc.
