Week 9

Kale 

Salad - I thought the salad of baby lettuces tasted great last week so we are going to do it again!

Persian Cucumbers -  Here is a short piece in the LA Times about the rise of this style of cucumber from 2011.  It was very interesting to me and probably somewhat interesting to those who garden and like to grow cucumbers.  The rest of you might want to skip it :).  We grew these for the first time probably about 10 years ago.  The seed was given to us by a friend's dad who is from Iran.  They didn't really catch on with us though and we didn't grow them again until about three years ago.  They are great.  They are excellent in smashed cucumber salads which I am a big fan of - the New York Times has a good recipe but there are many out there.  

Beets

Carrots

Head Lettuce - Large Only

Have a great week!

Week 8

We discovered more things this week that took a little hit from the heat.  Hopefully that is the last of the surprises.  The weeds, on the other hand, seem to be thriving.  We have enough crew to get almost everything planted and harvested, but we are going on year two of not being able to manage the weeds the way we should because we are short on labor.  

Last week's big projects were getting all the garlic out of the ground and getting the weeds under control in the winter squash.  It is always such a relief to have all the garlic pulled and in the barn.  This week we have a big round of fall crops to get transplanted and need to seed our final round of carrots.  

Salad Mix

Zucchini/Summer Squash

Garlic

Potatoes - gold skin, gold flesh this week.  

Herb - Dealer's Choice

Snap Peas if they are available and if not Carrots

Cherry Toms - Large Only 

Week 7

There was lots of talk of last week's heat at market this week.  Pretty much every farm took some sort of hit, from shellfish to berries.  In retrospect I made a poor decision to transplant out some cabbages, kale and broccoli mid week, about 1200 plants.  They were in small plug flats, 128 to a tray.  The greenhouse that we keep our seedlings in has no climate control, poor ventilation and even with the shade cloth on it is stuffy and hot.  At a little over three weeks from seeding they were more than ready to go out.  I doubted hanging onto them for another week would do them any favors.  The cauliflower, which seems to be the most sensitive to transplant, we held on to and didn't transplant.  I thought if we just watered the heck out of them they would do better in the ground than the start house.  I was wrong.  The cauliflower, while a little long in the tooth was fine, but we lost a lot of the stuff we transplanted, probably more than half.  We won't feel that loss until the very end of August and September.  We have another planting seeded three weeks after that one that typically would overlap slightly so we should be able to weather it okay.  

On the happy side of things I ate my first Sungold cherry tomato this week.  

Carrots

Lettuce 

Collards

Cucumbers 

Potatoes - True new potatoes with super thin skins and creamy flesh.  They won't keep long, refrigerate if you aren't going to eat them ASAP.  

Scallions - Small Only

Cauliflower - Large Only

Mystery Item - Large Only

Week 6

I am winging this list a little.  I usually walk around the farm on Sunday after market and confirm that everything I am thinking of putting in the boxes looks good and there is enough of each item - still a bit of a guessing game sometimes.  We got a lot of good stuff done this morning on the farm with Sunday market being cancelled but since lunch I have been hiding in my house.  Kelly just went  back out to turn on water, our only strategy at keeping stuff happy, but I decided to just stay put.  

I am hoping there are snap peas but they don't like the heat and this weather is unprecedented so I have no idea what to expect.  

Lettuce

Zucchini - I just can't get enough of these right now.  Hopefully you feel the same way.  When I pulled up the cauliflower taco recipe mentioned below I noticed this zucchini pasta recipe and that sent me down a rabbit hole of looking on the internet and also in my cookbooks for the Julia Child recipe found here.  We are going to have some sort of mashup of the two on pasta tonight.  I have some of the pearl onions you got last week in my fridge so I am going to include those but love the idea of not squeezing the zucchini in Deb's version. 

Green Stem Cauliflower - A new variety for us.  It has a green stem and is also known as flowering cauliflower.  It is widely grown in Asian countries.  It is said to be sweeter.  I am unsure if it is, but it is early and it is delicious.  It is also a bit unusual looking.  It starts out looking kind of like a normal cauliflower except it isn't self blanched with its own leaves so it isn't bright white. The curds also start to separate pretty early on.  If you have grown cauliflower it is best described as looking like cauliflower that didn't get picked in time.  You can pick it at that point but typically you wait a little longer and let it stretch and spread more.  This is the only planting we have of it and I want to make sure everyone gets one so it will be in slightly various degrees of maturity.  I talked about these cauliflower tacos last year.  It is what we made with the one I harvested Friday.  I loved how easy it was to chop - minor thing but still a bonus.  

Fennel

Garlic - This has not dried down at all.  You can use it right away but store it in open air so the moisture has somewhere to go.

Snap Peas or Something else.  

Scallions - Large Only

 Week 5

Pushed up start time this morning and we are hoping to beat the heat.  Kelly said last night that maybe we should leave when the crew leaves today....ummm, you bet.  Seems like a good afternoon for a little paperwork!  Love the little onions that are in your shares this week.  They are called purplette.  We planted them at a close spacing for bunching and I am really happy with how they turned out.  There is quite a bit of size variation.  The idea was to bunch them at pearl onion size but some are a bit bigger and some are barely there.  

With all the heat, I thought we might be able to do zucchinis and a cucumber but it looks pretty tight so it may be one or the other. 

All our heat loving crops, like tomatoes, peppers, melons, winter squash should have nice root systems and be able to put on a lot of growth this week with the warm weather and long days.  Hope you all are able to make the most of the summer days as well.  

Lettuce

Beets

Carrots

Zucchini or Cucumbers or maybe both

Bunched Baby Onions

Broccoli - Large Only

Basil - Large Only

 Week 4

We always try to give a round of spinach in the spring and in the fall.  We managed to get the large shares earlier and this week the small shares will receive some.  Large shares will get spinach's colorful cousin swiss chard.  

Looks like Juneuary is almost over.  For the most part we are thankful for the additional rain fall.  It is getting us a bit behind on weeding but hopefully we can make some progress later in the week.  

Salad Mix

Carrots

Turnips

Snap Peas

Spinach - Small Only

Chard - Large Only

Snow Peas - Larges plus maybe some smalls.  It might take us a bit but at some point everyone will get snow peas.  

Little Gem Lettuces - Large Only  

Next week we should have cucumbers for everyone and some pretty pearl onions.  

Week 3

Week 3

Carrots

Lettuce

Green Cabbage

Snap Peas - We had snap peas, burrata and prosciutto on Saturday as an appetizer/post market snack.  I quickly cooked the peas in a very hot skillet until they had a bit of char and were warm but still crunchy.  We were ridiculously hungry which would have made anything delicious but the sweet and salty combo with the burrata was so good, as was the different textures.

Scallions 

Garlic Scapes - These can be made into a pesto, chopped into a stir fry, grilled, roasted and used countless other ways.  They have a fairly pungent garlic flavor if used raw but become quite mild when cooked. 

Beets - Large Only