2014 Summer Newsletter #7

Basket contents: Mesclun, basil, potatoes, choice of Swiss chard or kale, choice of green onions or eggplant, tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers, zucchini, kohlrabi.

Recipe of the week: Lentil, Beans and Greens Soup

We’ve made it to August! This past week has been unseasonably cool, brining to mind the chilly mornings and evenings of the fall that is rapidly approaching. Hopefully we will still get a few more weeks of warmth and sun to help ripen our slow-going warm-weather-loving crops! Although we did get a week or so of hot hot heat, in general this season has been quick cool, and quite wet for us out here. Don’t worry, we’re sure the tomatoes will come on strong soon, they’re on their way!

Last week and this week we’ve been focused on getting our garlic harvested. For us, the garlic harvest is a landmark event, the first of the major harvests of a storage crop, where we pull it all in at once, and then give it out slowly over time. It’s a fun job to do with a lot of people, and we always try to invite out partners to come join us for it, but the timing is hard to guess with much notice, and so far the dates chosen for the partner workday have always been either too early or too late. But there are many more big harvests to come, and we will invite you to another on September 20th, the day of our harvest party, a date when there is always many crops ready for harvest, regardless of the weather. So for this year it will be Heather, Rachelle and Eby harvesting your garlic to the tune of 5000 bulbs! That should give us plenty for your summer and winter baskets, and hopefully enough to save to replant in the fall as well (another partner workday planned for October!).

This week in your basket we offer you the first of our new potato harvest! The big harvest of storage potatoes will come in September, before the frosts, but this week we start with the first tubers, still young, tender and easily damaged. Unlike the potatoes you’ll get later, these potatoes haven’t cured, that is to say their skin is thin and fragile and so they will not store as long as the main crop potatoes you’ll get this fall. Keep new potatoes in your fridge for up to a few weeks in a perforated plastic bag so that they don’t lose all of their moisture. This is also true for the garlic you’ll receive this week. It is fresh out of the ground and hasn’t gone through the curing process we’ll do for the rest of the crop. That means plan on eating it sooner rather than later, unlike the cured garlic you will receive this fall, which can be stored in a dark, cool, well-ventilated place until the spring.

That’s it for now! It’s time to go out and harvest more garlic before the rains begin again! See you at drop-offs!