Week 14

Well, August is done.  The rain came.  It feels like fall.   However, I am sure we have some nice days ahead of us and we won't be moving on to winter squash and parsnips just yet!  No need to rush, we have plenty of time to enjoy those. We do have a veggie making it's farm premier this week - celery.  It is our first year growing it.  We only had one planting and it looks and tastes great.  It has a more intense celery flavor than what you buy in the supermarket, particularly the outer leaves.  My mother told me that when I was little we use to eat braised celery.  I don't remember it nor would it have ever occurred to me to make it if she hadn't mentioned it, but she made it sound delicious.  I looked at a recipe out of Julia Child's first book but ended up making a simpler version I found on line.  I included a link below.  I used chicken stock instead of beef (Julia favors beef as well, but I had chicken on hand).  I really liked it.

While Kelly was at market last Tuesday and I was frantically cleaning the house in hopes of making it look like we are just very neat and tidy people all the time, Ian and Jo did a nice job of getting most of the onions out last Tuesday.  We had a big push early last week to get everything that had matured out of the ground before it rained.  I meant to take a picture of them before it got dark but time slipped away from me.  They look great.  If you would have told me in April that we might have the nicest onions we have ever grown I would have either laughed at you or called you nasty names.  There was a period when I wondered if we would even have onions this year.  For some reason many of the seedlings died and those that didn't weren't growing any roots.  I ended up seeding all the remaining seed we had left three weeks after our normal seed date.  The first round ended up growing roots after doing nothing for about a month and the new ones which I seeded in different potting soil looked great but they all got transplanted later than we ever have transplanted them before.  They all look great.  There were a couple beds that got planted even later than the rest with some of the onions that took so long to grown roots.  I was so doubtful about their success that I didn't even label the different varieties.  They aren't mature yet and we left them in the ground but I am hopeful for those as well.

Carrots
Beets 
Cherry Tomatoes
Celery
Zucchini
Garlic
Basil
Broccoli - Large Only
Slicing Tomato - Large Only


Braised Celery