Sunshiney July

Some highlights of our gardening adventures in July

A mid-July harvest of Kale, Collards, Radnips, Carrots, Beans, and Romaine Lettuce.

Happy Smiling Sunflowers.

 

Photo by Andrea Nickerson

Farmer Andrea’s Kales are Trees.

Farmer Andrea’s Companion Planting of Beets and Broccoli is thriving.

The heat of Summer brings on goodies like Tomatoes (variety: Bosche Blue), Eggplant, Summer Squash (Zucchini + Patty Pan), Winter Squash (like this Acorn Squash), and Watermelon.

Farmer Faenin is proud of how large his Onions are, these are early ones.

A Pear Tree planted for baby Lennon 17 years ago has it’s first Red Pear; a lovely Butterfly is sipping sweet juice from rotting fruit.

‘Seal’ Lavender throwing up the largest spears of all our varieties.

First time growing Wild Tobacco, for ceremonial purposes.

View of perennial beds of Sorrel, Onions (for seed), Chamomile, Plantain, Calendula, Horseradish, Chives, Strawberries, Asparagus, and Raspberries, with some Ground Cherries thrown in.

One of only a few successful Cucumbers.

It might be time to stop trying to grow Cucumbers outdoors. Between the insects and the mildew it’s a whole lot of work for nothing most years. We keep on trying because we love the taste of field Cukes in varieties not found in any store.

July is Garlic harvesting, and hanging to dry time. Many thanks to Paul + Andy for getting most of these beauties out of the field.

pretty little garlic all in a row

Farmer Andrea’s mom came to visit and they harvested some monster Kale!

Farmer Andrea also introduced the Veggie-Table. Held outside an art studio she shares with her partner, they are bringing Fresh, Local Veggies + Art to downtown Tilbury.

 

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Important Information – Please Read

Week #19 begins with a few updates.

For farm members: Saturday markets will start at 9 am (not 8 am) starting tomorrow, October 1st. Saturday October 8th will be the last market of the season and The Cheese Bar will be present – they helped us open the season and they’ll be there to close the season. Facebook event details. After that we’ll be emailing out a weekly list of the veggies we’ll have available and will be packing up individual orders that can be picked up at the farm. Check your emails for more details and please talk to us about these changes when you see us at the farm in the next 2 weeks.

For ALL members: Before the season began we had hoped to run for 24 weeks – until November – but that is no longer realistic. The CSA will end on Saturday October 22nd for farm members and Wednesday October 26th for ShopEco/Windsor members. If you have a basic, pre-packaged bag, we will be emailing you if your bag is to end sooner than the above dates. Please talk to us at the next few markets if you have any concerns or questions. We are letting folks know in advance because if you’re on the credit system you’ll want to make sure you use up your credits before the last week. There is a small chance we’ll be able to go longer but that will be a bonus rather than part of the core CSA program. The CSA has always been 20 weeks long, this year we were hoping for 24, and we could have started even earlier (we started 2 weeks earlier than ever), but these are all things we learn from each year as farming is always a work in progress.

October Vegetable Share from 2015

We have ordered bulk potatoes, carrots, and beets that will be available on Wednesday October 5th and Saturday October 8th – in time for Thanksgiving! There are other options for using up credits as well – dried herbs and herbal teas, sun-dried tomatoes, tinctures, pickled asparagus, honey, and *fingers crossed* seeds to get you started on next year’s garden, dried beans (eg, kidney and black beans, for cooking), salves, hot pepper sauce, and pesto. Or simply stock up on all the veggies we have available and fill your freezers so you can make nourishing meals all Winter. We’ve found that the Scallion Roots make a very delicious stock! We came across this link for vegan “bone broth” that gives you lots of ideas for using up veggies ~ http://cleanfooddirtycity.com/recipes/healing-soup-with-vegan-bone-broth/

If you haven’t been convinced to start canning than maybe this comprehensive link (download included) will help ~ https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/135558/posts/1172189242

Preparing a Digestive Herbal Tea

We’ve been lucky in many ways with this season so far. It’s been the most productive and the longest tomato season ever! The drought has given incredible bumper crops to every commercial Tomato grower, so much that we, and others, are letting the fruits rot on the vines because the demand isn’t there. I guess folks don’t want Tomatoes as much as we thought they would. We’ve also got more Melons + Squash to harvest, that’s exciting! But, we weren’t able to plant new crops to tide us over for the rest of the season. There is an insect in the soil in all parts of our gardens that eats every root crop, crops that we rely on to extend the vegetable season well into November. Other insects (due to no Winter kill) have decimated every seedling we planted and despite using organic insecticides we could not beat them this year. Every season is different – different highs and different lows – and we must go with the flow and cross our fingers that there will be enough for everyone. CSA’s – community supported agriculture – help farmers remain viable because they value community and take the risks as well as the benefits.

VEGGIE OF THE WEEK IS EGGPLANT + SUMMER SQUASH

We’ve had these 2 vegetables available for many, many weeks now, but never in enough numbers to be an “official” veggie of the week. But as staples of the garden they deserve recognition. Every year since we started being market gardeners we hear that there is too much Eggplant and Zucchini (a type of Summer Squash) and every year we plan to plant less and less of them so that we have a steady supply versus an over-abundance. Eggplant are ready to harvest early in the season and give a steady supply until frost comes. We started growing smaller sized Eggplant a few years ago so that no one is stuck with large amounts of large Eggplant. This website is chock-full of recipes – hundreds of them – for both Eggplant and Summer Squash. We actually planted over 200 Summer Squash (mostly Patty Pans) this year but the seedlings were eaten by Striped Cucumber Beetles, the seedlings that managed to grow couldn’t produce fruit because the Cucumber Beetle ate the flowers. Even growing a large variety of this prolific fruit didn’t help us to have very much of this garden staple.

Q: Where do chickens come from?

A: The Egg-plant.

Huh?

Produce available this week (may vary depending upon location and availability): Salad Mix, Kale + Chard, Scallions, Beans, Sweet + Hot Peppers, Tomatoes (slicing, canning, cherry), Broccoli, Mushrooms, mini-Cucumbers, Savoy Cabbage, Kohlrabi, Eggplant, Summer Squash, Winter Squash, Garlic, and fresh herbs.

Spotted at the farm this week, Several Swallowtails munching on the same Wild Carrot plant, so many that they couldn’t all be photographed at once!

How many Swallowtails can you spot?

 Stay dry everyone!

 

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Thank you Sun, Thank you Rain

We are praising the Sun and it’s heat, and the Rain and it’s moisture, for providing us with an abundant harvest on Week 10 of the season!

Lettuce in Flower, the face of the Sun

VEGGIE OF THE WEEK IS GARLIC!!!

We are finally able to offer our sought-after GARLIC in large quantities and to the public!!!

Garlic hanging to dry and cure

From last week’s market table

Garlic is a must for every meal in our house, it isn’t a meal without Garlic! The variety we grow is called Music and it thrives in our rich soil.

New this week is our much loved mix of fresh snap Beans, folks who’ve tried our mixes ask for them year after year. They include Dragon, Tongue of Fire, Rattlesnake, Blu Jay, Amethyst, as well as a variety of red, yellow, and green beans.

Also new this week (in limited quantities, for now) – Candy Tomatoes!

On our market tables this week we’ll also have: Red Cabbage and Cabbage Leaves, Chinese (Napa) Cabbage, Spaghetti Squash + Sweet Dumpling Squash, Mini-Cumcumbers, Mushrooms, Sweet Peppers, Eggplant, Summer Squash, Scallions, Grape Leaves, Rainbow Leafies, Kohlrabi (limited), Fennel, Basil and other fresh herbs, Broccoli, and small amounts of Beets.

Week 10 is looking fabulous!

From around the farm this week …

Polyphemus Moth

Red Spotted Purple Butterfly

Baby Ants, newly hatching from their nest under a Tree.

The farm children were quite surprised with the Cucumbers they’ve been growing in their own personal garden! These were shared and enjoyed with all our neighbourhood children.

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Short and Sweet

Once again we find ourselves betwixt and between, a season that comes every year, when it’s too hot for salad, kale, and roots, and when the goodies of summer like tomatoes, peppers, and beans, aren’t quite ready. But take heart, the tomatoes and beans have indeed begun, we’ve had our first taste of them this week *smiles* This heat, while making harvesting quite a challenge for us, does wonders for Summertime veggie favourites.

This is also a week when we’re unsure of what we’ll find to fill out the weekly veggie shares so keep in mind there will be a lot of SURPRISES in the next couple of weeks. We found some spaghetti squash as well as delicata and sweet dumpling squashes that might find their way to our market tables next week.

A note about the purple peppers – these are actually green peppers that have been bred to have a purple skin so think of them as purple green peppers, if that makes sense, haha.

Much thanks this week to our “extension” farmer, Siobhan P, who brought us big, juicy purslane and baby beet greens and who will later have beets and other treats for our members. This is a work share partnership where we exchange veggies for veggies and harvesting help for veggies. We’re very grateful for these farm friends.

The veggie of the week this week is: BASIL!

A fragrant treat while we wait for the flush of Tomatoes, Basil is a versatile kitchen herb. Traditionally used to season tomato-based pasta sauces it stores better when it’s turned into Pesto (drying and freezing drastically reduce it’s volatile oils, those to which is owes is fragrance). There are as many ways to make Pesto as there are ways to use pesto.

A basic pesto recipe looks like this:

GARLIC SCAPE PESTO

1 pound Garlic Scapes or 1 whole head of garlic

1 bunch of Basil, Arugula, Kale, Fennel or any other leafy green

1 cup grated Parmesan cheese or nutritional yeast

1/2 to 1 cup of Olive Oil

2 Tablespoons lemon juice (optional)

1/2 cup Walnuts, Almonds, Pecans, Pine Nuts, Sunflower seeds or Pumpkin seeds (optional)

Chop the Scapes into 3 inch lengths (for easier processing). Put it in the food processor and process until pureed. Add the Basil or other leafy green and process until smooth. Add the parmesan or nutritional yeast and nuts or seeds and process until smooth again. Add lemon juice then slowly add the olive oil as the food processor is running and continue until all the oil is combined. You might need to slowly add the oil and lemon with the leafy greens to get your processor to blend everything properly. Store in an air-tight jar in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks or freeze.

A recipe for a nut free lacto-fermented pesto can be found here.

CSA member Wendy Rose shared this recipe last season (Basil can be swapped out for Fennel) ~

Fennel Fronds Pesto

by Wendy Rose

Ingredients:

2 cups fennel fronds, stemmed removed and packed

1/2 cup almond flour or slivered almonds

2 tbsp hemp hearts

4 cloves garlic, minced

1/3 – 1/2 cup olive oil

1/2 tsp sea salt

1/2 tsp garlic powder

Directions:

1. Add all ingredients into a high powered blender and blend until smooth.

Basil can also be blended with a small amount of water or with an oil and put into ice cube trays and into the freezer. Pop them out when frozen and put into a freezer bag. Each cube makes for an easy way to add flavour to a plain tomato sauce. Or use the pesto for a tomato sauce free alternative for your favourite pasta noodles. We love pesto on fresh tomatoes, as a veggie dip, on sandwiches.

Veggies you might find this week include: Cabbage leaves, Grape leaves, Scallions, Red Cabbage, Napa/Chinese Cabbage, Kohlrabi, Portabella Mushrooms, mini Cucumbers, fresh Garlic, Peppers, Eggplant, Summer Squash, Winter Squash, Broccoli, and of course, Basil and other fresh and dried Herbs.

P.S. The Veggies tab has been updated with links to Summer Squash and Eggplant recipes!

We took time this week to pick organic Blueberries from Blueberry Hill in Rodney.

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Our Cool Colourful Vegetables!

We’re often asked why we grow such a diversity of colours and if the colourful veggies taste the same as “regular” ones. Well…there are many reasons we grow colourful vegetables! You can’t deny that the pop of colour pleases the eye as well as the palate but growing a variety of colours also makes for better growing conditions (most of the time). Take Kale for instance….the “regular” green curled Kale is the slowest growing and least productive of all of the 10 or so varieties we’ve grown and the non-green Kales aren’t a tasty treat for the White Cabbage Moth’s Caterpillars that decimates crops so quickly (and requires an investment in insect netting as well as regular applications of organic pest controls, which has it’s downsides even in organic/ecological farming). As seen here…you’ll understand why we haven’t had Kale available for a couple of weeks now….

Skeletonized Kale (yes, we made that word up).

This is also why we grow Red Cabbage vs Green Cabbage – to fool the Cabbage Moths. Sometimes a crop that is colourful is just more productive, take Dragon Beans for example, they produce Beans over the whole season instead of the 2 pickings you get from green or yellow Beans, and they are tastier! Purple Peppers are the first to ripen. Yellow Cucumbers like Poona Kheera and Lemon are more resistant to the diseases that plague Cukes and they are more productive. Colourful Tomatoes are more flavourful but also give a diversity of flavours when you’re snaking on our Candy Cherry Tomatoes. The more colourful the veggie the more diverse the vitamins and minerals and the healthier they are. And of course….I cannot resist anything that is purple but everyone already knows that, hahaha.

Double Dragon Carrot, Dragon Beans, Brocco-flower, Heirloom Tomatoes, Sweet Peppers.

Sometimes we grow colourful and strange vegetables in order to try and find a couple of varieties that will produce and withstand tough conditions like the Squash Vine Borer, Downy Mildew, Powdery Mildew and more that plague Squashes (we haven’t been very successful so far but there are many more varieties to try)….

‘Winter Sweet’, ‘Spaghetti’, ‘Delicata’ + ‘Sweet Mama’, Squash Vine Borer

On a happier note we have seen Squash Bees around….no pic but here’s a link for more info on this native pollinators.

We’re curing our pumpkins and squash right now but you will see some of the varieties that aren’t good for storage in the coming weeks. Spaghetti Squash has many uses – cooked or raw. For fun, Why Is Squash Called Squash.

This week’s pick list includes but varies depending upon location …..

•  Our Salad is thriving again and we’ve got plenty of delicious Salad Mix
• We’ve picked the last of the Kohlrabi and the Cucumbers have almost seen the end of their days as well
• Some of you have already seen the Broccoflower and others will see it this week while supplies last
• The Sweet Peppers aren’t at peak yet but are starting to come on strong, much to my delight! I love the little Snacking ‘Lunchbox’ Peppers (last season’s post on them) and like last season I cannot stop eating them!
• We have limited amounts of hot peppers and okra for those who are interested
• Chinese Eggplant
• Garlic and Onions (Onion supplies are running low so stock up now if you want some for the Fall and Winter)
• limited amounts of Scallions will be ready again
• new this week is the long awaited Dragon Beans, included in a mix with Cherokee Trail of Tears and Rattlesnake Pole Beans
• Our Heirloom Tomatoes and Candy Tomatoes are still going strong. If you want to use up some of your remaining credit we are still taking orders for bushel baskets (must be ordered in advance) – $25 per 20+lb basket. It’s also super easy to make sun-dried Tomatoes using the Candies – just slice once and put in a dehydrator. Here’s a great recipe using Sun-dried Tomatoes. Some raw food recipes using Tomatoes, and a plethora of recipes using a multitude of veggies at once!
• Also new this week…Hakurei Turnips! After hearing other CSA’s rave about these I had to try them this year! They’re like a sweet Radish or a juicy Turnip – both and neither at the same time – with leaves that taste just like a mildly spicy lettuce mix we grow. Here are some recipe ideas (if you don’t eat them raw like I do) – The Better Turnip, Salad Turnips, Pickled Harukei Turnips.

* We’ve always got a variety of fresh herbs for sale, too, and if you don’t think you’ll use them fresh just string them up and let them dry so you can use them when needed all year long. Thyme, Oregano, Basil, Rosemary, and Sage.

Tyler from Union Herbs getting your fresh herbs ready for market!

From the “what you missed on Facebook” this week file….

From chef Ben at The Iron Kettle Bed & Breakfast – “I split the fennel down the seam but left the core so that the strands can stay together, like a cabbage, and I grilled it with some olive oil, salt and pepper over extremely high heat. Served it with a roasted chicken basted in butter that was whipped with the fennel fronds. Roasted the tomatoes whole and made a chutney to serve with the chicken.”

#workperks Farm friend and employee Andrea has been busy turning Tomatoes into sauce, paste, salsa, ketchup, and sun-dried tomatoes.

At the new ShopEco location at 1645 Wyandotte with Envy Boutique.

Our market offerings at the Belle River Farmers Market on Sundays.

Coming soon from our experimental strawbale bed (with thanks to farm friend Siobhan for the idea!)….

Tomatillos

The weather sure can be hard on the soil….

Till next time!

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The Tantalizing Tomatoes Of Tilbury Town

You will soon find out why we call them Candy Tomatoes!

We put a lot of time and effort in to perfecting our Candy Tomato mixes by choosing just the right varieties to please the palate and the eye. This year we are growing Black Cherry, 42 Days, Fargo Yellow Pear, Bing, Sweetie, Peacevine, Isis Candy, Blush, Pink Tiger, Green Tiger, as well as Sunrise, Pink and Purple Bumblebee.

Our slicing, beefsteak, and sauce Tomatoes are coming on as well – thank you heat! – heirlooms like Japanese Trifele, Moonglow, Druzba, Black Krim, Eva Purple Ball, Bison, Djena Lee’s Golden Girl, Zapotec Pleated, Forme De Coeur, Rose De Berne, Cherokee Purple, Copia, Striped Roman, Purple Russian, Bellstar, Gilbertie, Black Plum and more.

We are full swing in to harvesting season so we’ll let pictures tell the story of life around the farm this past week as well as what fresh vegetables to expect in the coming week.

Red Cabbage. Can you see the face in the picture on the left?

The tasty mini-cabbage that I eat like an apple. Mmmmcrunch! Don’t be afraid to try Kohlrabi, even if it sometimes looks like a monster face… because only the farmers eat the monsters <wink>

Purple Peppers, Chinese Eggplant, Summer Squash, Okra, and Field Cucumbers (picklers, green slicers, silver slicers, poona kheera – yellow – and Armenian) as well as a super Cucumber picker + taste-tester farm child.

Add flavour to your dishes with our fresh Onions – red, white, spanish – and our Purple + Green Basil.

The Garlic harvest over, we recently sold 24 heads of Garlic to be enjoyed at a wedding that features all local food. Our veggies will be gracing dishes such as – Creamy garlic dressing, Green goddess, Shallot vinaigrette, Avocado corn soup, Rub for the prime rib, and Anti pasta grilled veggies.

Dried mint with pestle and mortar; Quiche with Kale

Helpers around the farm….Everyone has a job and we all have fun!

Baby Mourning Doves; Caterpillar Larvae of the Cecropia Moth

We are looking for harvesting help this coming holiday Monday and would love to show you around the farm. We’ll be working from 9 am until 4 pm, come if you can and see where your food is grown.

Happy Long Summer Weekend everyone!

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Pressing The Pause Button

We are going on 8 weeks with too much rain, 8 weeks ago is when we were supposed to plant the Beets and the Turnips that you’d be eating this week. 8 weeks with too much rain and we’ve had to cross off Cantaloupes, Honey Dew Melons and 2,000 Squash from the “to plant” list. 8 weeks with too much rain and the full effects of that are still to be seen fully but are already apparent in the unhappy (yet still growing) Tomatoes and Cucumbers. The only crops growing well, and extremely well, are the Kales and Chard and we can’t do a market or a CSA with only Kale and Chard. And so … we pause … and let the land drain and let the crops thrive and grow with the heat. We will be at the Belle River Farmers Market tomorrow (Sunday July 19th) but we will NOT be at ShopEco on Tuesday July 21st nor at Take Back The Farm on Thursday July 23rd and we will be taking a break from the Belle River Farmers Market on Sunday July 26th.

A modified plow along with the human-power of J and Mr. Muscles dug these trenches so that our fields could finally start draining.

We did manage to work up a small garden and plant Beets and Turnips this afternoon – small success! As a back up plan we are trying a straw-bale garden based on the success of one of our farm friends and we transplanted Tomatillos and planted a few Summer Squash in to it.

Do I thank our work share folks and volunteers and employee and family every week? If I haven’t then I need to start doing so. We have an amazing group of farm friends who pull through every time we need help – thank you to every one of our very special farm friends, we couldn’t do it without you!

That includes…..Tyler and Katrina Strickler of Union Herbs who’ve been providing the CSA with the lovely Basil and ever-fragrant Rosemary, Thyme, Oregano, and more! They are based in Ruthven, ON and follow organic methods for their growing. They are trying their hand at small-scale gardening and decided that herbs were a good place to start. We’re very happy to be able to provide these quality herbs to our CSA members thanks to Union Herbs!

Around the farm this week….

Andrea is training Cucumbers (coming soon!) and Pumpkins (full of Blossoms) as we prepare to take a weed-wacker and lawn-mower in these areas to keep down the weeds. Only the weeds seem to thrive with all this cool-weather and Rain!

In bloom….

Edible Lillies and other pretty pollen-rich food sources.

The good and the bad….

A white caterpillar moth’s chrysalis; ladybug larvae feasting on aphids

Coming soon….

Top L to R: Napa Cabbage, Red Cabbage, Pea Blossom, Red Onions, Spanish Onions.

Have a lovely week friends, we’ll see you on the flip side!

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Week #15

Pick List this week (varies by location) :

Squash!

A variety of mini-Squash – variety names to come next week!

Surprise Squash (aka Unknown)

Fragrant Parsley

Rainbow Chard, Rainbow Kale, Salad Mix with Nasturtiums

Baby Beets

Eggplant, Summer Squash, Cucumbers, Sweet Peppers

Watermelon!

Scallions, with looong green, edible stems.

Mayan Habanero

 

 

The very last of the Tomatoes, mostly unripe.

You can leave the Tomatoes out on the counter to ripen or you can try some of these recipes with the green Tomatoes: Fried Green Tomatoes, Pickled Vegetables (Tursija) (link provided by a CSA member), 25 Recipe ideas from Tipnut, and recipes from thekitchn.com.

We love hearing about how you are using your fresh, local produce to make delicious dishes! Please share here on the blog or on our facebook page so that others may get new ideas for using their veggies and thank you to those who’ve already shared.

Pictured: Crimson Sweet Watermelon, Eggplant, Scallions, Hot Peppers, Squash, Tomatoes, Sweet Peppers, Parsley, Rainbow Chard.

 

 

 

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Week 12

Welcome to Week 12, where September feels like early August!

We discovered a parasitized Hornworm while picking Cherry Tomatoes on Monday and it’s too bad we don’t carry cameras while we work because it’s quite a sight and a good sign for us! Unfortunately the dying Tomato plants aren’t a good sign.

Almost every week I ask my 14 yo to take a picture of the weekly basket and I think it’s because of his natural artistic flair that he takes over 15 different pictures from various angles. I don’t give him any direction as to how to lay out the produce but I love the pictures every time. I am posting some of his layouts throughout this post because I just love his creativity!

upside down

hard angles

Pick list (may be different depending on location) :

Candy Tomatoes – an idea for an abundance of these Tomatoes is to “sun-dry” them either with a dehydrator or the actual Sun. We simply cut them in half and put them in the dehydrator, they take 24-48 hrs to dry. We then either put them in jars, in the freezer, or in olive oil. For more ideas and techniques to Sun-dry check out this post on Pickyourown.org

Sandwich / Slicing / Roma-Paste Tomatoes

Sweet Peppers – Red, Orange, Yellow, Purple, multi-coloured – these Peppers are gorgeous! This was my first year growing the Lunchbox variety from Johnny’s Seeds and when I was picking the little red ones (easily confused with Hot Peppers) I was cursing at how difficult they were to pick and muttering that I wouldn’t grow them again. But…..then I tasted them. And I can’t stop eating them. They are the best Pepper I’ve ever had. I can eat several pounds of them in a sitting without even noticing and then still want more!

Fishies in the ocean of grass

Salad Mix with Nasturtium Flowers

Cucumbers or Hot Peppers – this does seem like a strange either/or choice but when we went to harvest Cucumbers most of the plants were dead, not just dying but brown and dry, totally dead. It’s been a terrible year for Cucumbers as they are already, in a good year, susceptible to Mildews and Blight, and they hate being rained on, especially in cool weather. So we picked all the Hot Peppers we could as they have been well received by members. This job belongs to my 9yo but they sustained an injury while doing the job so we had to call in back up.

Watermelon – these are finally coming to our members who pick up at Shop Eco! Don’t be alarmed by a white or yellow interior, our Watermelons come in many colours and you have to taste them to know how sweet they are. If you happen to get an unripe Watermelon please let us know so we can send you another one.

The Week 12 Basket of Organic Veggies:

Pictured: Cucumber, Summer Squash, Tomatoes, Eggplant, Sweet and Hot Peppers, Candy Tomatoes, Salad Mix with Nasturtiums, Rainbow Roots

 

 

 

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Week #11

Note: this was just a quick and abridged version of the weekly blog post. (Stay tuned for pictures to be added as well as links and more info.)

Every Tuesday except for 1 in the last 11 weeks it has rained and stormed and yesterday was no exception. We were sopping wet. Pictures were not taken. The bare minimum was done to get the veggies harvested and put away. It seemed ridiculous to be hand-washing Beets in the pouring rain but there we were. And the veggies are waiting to be packed up and taken to Windsor this afternoon.

On this week’s Pick list (items will vary with location) :

Salad Mix (Nasturtium flowers)

Candy Cherry Tomatoes – if you find you are getting too many of these try slicing them in half and dehydrating them to have a supply of sun-dried tomatoes for the Winter

Sandwich and Sauce Tomatoes – great week to turn our delicious tomatoes into sauce for the Winter

Delicious Sauce Tomatoes!

Sweet Peppers – Lunchbox (the small red ones look like hot peppers but they are super sweet and tasty!), Glow (orange bell), Islander (purple pepper), King of the North (red bell), King Crimson (red bell).

Eat the Rainbow!

Lunchbox Snacking Peppers

Hot Peppers

Eggplant or Summer Squash (this is likely the last week for Summer Squash, the plants will be done by next week)

Cucumbers – Armenian “Snake”, Slicers, Lemon, Boothby’s,

Rainbow Beets and Turnips

Select locations are getting Watermelon – please be assured everyone will get a Watermelon. This week Watermelons are going to members who pick up at Take Back The Farm and The Urban Greenhouse, where I will be from 4pm until 7 pm today. Don’t forget I’ll have Organic Pickles and Local Honey for sale!

A note about the Watermelons – many of the fruits that are ready right now are yellow or white inside so please don’t fret and think that you got an unripe one, you won’t know until you try it!

Farming note: Mildew and mold have swept through all the plants due to the cold and wet weather, mostly the wet. Basil has been decimated, Dragon Beans, too. Our first plantings of Cucumbers are done. It is affecting the Tomatoes badly though they are still producing. <fingers crossed> it doesn’t get any worse!

Bounty of the County Week, too much to all be pictured! Several POUNDS of: Sauce Tomatoes, Candy Cherry Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Armenian Cucumber, SWEET Peppers, Eggplant, and Summer Squash. Salad mix with Nasturtiums, Rainbow Beets + Turnips, Watermelon, bonus Hot Peppers.

 

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