Week 13

I already regret complaining about last week's heat.  It is just that I got a little too hot but now I am not hot enough.  I need help.  Really though, I do.  Kelly's family arrives on Wednesday…11 of them!  They are only here for a couple days and they are staying in a hotel so it really shouldn't be a big deal.  The rub is that we like things to be perfect and it is hard to ever be perfect but it is particularly challenging for us in August.  It is hard to explain August but it is not the easiest month to get through.  

I am looking forward to cooking a nice meal and sharing with them the food we grow.  I am also afraid that they won't understand how much that food and what we do with our lives means to us.  It isn't that they aren't great people.  I feel incredibly lucky to genuinely like my in-laws.  It is just that our life is so different than theirs and I am not sure they will appreciate the things that we value about our life.  I am fine with people thinking we are little crazy and in the case of my parents that we work to hard as long as they enjoy the food.  The other day my dad told Kelly that the watermelon he gave him was the best watermelon he had ever eaten.  It made my day.  

I know that the veggies in your box aren't always perfect (although we try) but I hope you are enjoying them and sharing food and meals with people you care about.  Knowing that people are enjoying meals together with food that we grew (along with a lot of help) is one of the things that makes my job great.  I love it when people send me photos of their kids eating veggies or tell me about what they cooked.  Don't worry, I become much less emotional once September arrives…more sleep, less sentimental!  

Enjoy your veggies.  

Arugula 

Rainbow Peppers - you choose, there will be a basket full on the stand.

Kale - Hopefully mixed bunches If you have ever wanted to eat a kale salad but been afraid that it will be all chewy and tough this is your best chance.  The last few years we have given the farm share our first picking off the fall kale.  It has been living under row cover for bug protection and it is very tender.  I will put a couple kale salad recipes at the end but I have a couple general suggestions.  I like to remove most of the rib and slice it thin or chop it and I either massage it or let the dressing sit on it for a little while (it is the first thing I make if I am having it for dinner). 

Cherry Tomato

Slicing Tomato

Cucumber

Melon - I am not sure what awaits us in the melon patch tomorrow.  The Tuscan melons and piel de sapos are close.  

Eggplant - Large Only

Little Gem Lettuce - Large Only
Shiso - Add On Only - This will start on Wednesday and then continue next Monday.  Shiso is a Japanese herb that is in the mint family.  It is sometimes called Japanese basil.  It has an amazing aroma and a distinct flavor that is hard to describe.  You will have green shiso.  It is often served wrapped around sushi and can sometimes be found in rolls.  You can use the leaves like little wraps around rice, grilled chicken skewers or veggies.   When I asked a friend born if Japan if the shiso looked okay she became very excited, laid it on her palm and than clapped her other hand down on it to release the aroma.   Here a few things to look at:  Ume pasta with shiso and nori, shiso wrapped chicken, shiso cocktail, sushi roll with plum and shiso

Kale Salads

Sesame Kale Salad

The following two recipes are similar.  Both have a lemony dressing, bread crumbs and grated cheese.  The second is basically a slightly different rendition of the first with the addition of raisons and walnuts.  Both ways are great, but the first is the simplest.  They both call for Tuscan kale or Lacinato kale but any kale will be fine.

Kale Salad with Bread Crumbs
Kale Salad with Bread Crumbs, Walnuts and Raisons

Week 12

We had two goals today after delivery.  One was to thresh the seed from the beet plants we pulled out of the ground and spread on tarps last week and the other was to get space cleared out/cleaned up to start receiving onions.  The onions started falling over here and there a week or so ago but in the past couple days a lot of them have fallen.  Everyday I marvel at how quickly time passes.

I took this picture about a week and half ago when they where just starting to fall.  Once an onion's neck goes soft and the top falls over it is done growing.   There was a point in the spring when we thought we may have lost all our onion seedlings and we thought it might be too late to start new ones.   I am ecstatic with how great they look.

As seed growing newbies we don't have a lot of fancy equipment or a definite plan for how to accomplish the threshing but we made do and it went pretty well.

Lettuce
Carrots - Purple Haze
Broccoli
Cabbage
Cherry Tomatoes
Potatoes - Satina, gold skin, gold flesh
Korean Melon - Sun Jewel - Small Only
Watermelon- Large Only

The beets took a while(most things take longer than we think they will) so I am off to join Kelly to make some space in our blue metal building for the onions.  Hope you all had a great weekend.

Week 11

We hit the melon patch on Friday.  We harvested a few almost ripe watermelons and a few Sun Jewels, the Korean style melon.  Some melons, such as the Sun Jewel, are really easy to judge when they are ready to eat.  First they turn yellow and then if they are ready the stem will slip which is means it will release from the melon when you apply the smallest amount of pressure to it.  Some melons are what we call forced slip, meaning they are ripe when the stem releases with a little encouragement.  Some melons are harvested based on color and skin condition.  The watermelons are the trickiest.  We look for a tendril that is dying down or dead depending on the variety.  Sometimes we look for a nice yellow spot where the melon sits on the ground and sometimes the skin changes color just a little bit.  We also thump them but that isn't always reliable and each variety has its own quirks.  We eat a lot of melons during melon season, particularly new varieties to make sure we understand how to harvest them.  It is fun to wade through the patch grabbing random melons and sampling them (along with hot, sticky and dusty and melons are heavy and difficult to haul out of the field - just incase you are jealous I will give you the full description).

Carrots
Lettuce
Cucumbers
Cherry Tomatoes
Sweet Onion
Herb Choice - most likely cilantro, dill, parsley or basil
Bell Pepper
Slicing Tomato
Sun Jewel Melon - Large Only
Papa Cacho Fingerling Potato - Add On Veggie Only

Papa Cacho-
Can you believe what you read on the internet?  We have tried to grow fingerlings before but we always end up underwhelmed with the results.  The seed costs more, they have a lower yield and because they are small they get culled harder for blemishes.  One blemish on a large potato isn't a big deal but who wants to peel a bunch of baby potatoes?  Anyway, I have a habit of deciding something isn't worth growing only to be lured in by some description on the internet or seed catalog that convinces me we need to try growing it again.  Papa Cacho has a cool name, is from Peru and lives up to its fingerling name with long somewhat strange looking tubers.  It is suppose to have decent yields and late blight resistance.  It is also uncommon and I had never seen seed available before.  Oh yeah, I fell for it hard.  When our seed potato shipment arrived in the spring we unpacked it and put the potatoes into crates to check for any rot and to let them come out of dormancy before planting them Kelly remarked on them.  Something heavy with with sarcasm like "I bet these are going to do great" came out of his mouth.  Well, I dug a plant today and I really hope they all look like the ones I dug today do.  They are beautiful - bright pinkish red and blemish free.  The flesh is also pretty - white with pink streaking.  The yields don't seem great, but decent for fingerling and the plants look healthier than any other potato out there.  Maybe, big maybe, I have found the fingerling for us!