Full Share: Sweet corn, Shishito Peppers, Beans or Potatoes, Carrots, Sungold Tomatoes, Slicing Tomato, Salad Mix, Onion, Zucchini, and Cucumber
Partial Share: Sweet Corn, Eggplant, Sungold Tomatoes, Carrots, Slicing Tomato, a small onion, a small cucumber, and Spinach.
Hello CSA members!
Today felt like a time warp. I picked salad mix, then potatoes. Then I spent a bunch of time washing greens. Then I cleaned some garlic in the greenhouse with the crew. And then a friend brought some farmers from South Carolina out to walk around…and poof! Here it is 7:30pm, and it feels like it should be 3 in the afternoon. Sort of seems the entire summer is flying by like that as well. While the days are still quite warm, our night time temps are getting mighty close to frost. I know some farmers in the valley were starting to see frost in their crops just as the sun came up this morning, in fact. Our mild temps all season have pushed back the harvest of many of our main summer crops, so even though fall is in the air, the shares are quintessential summer. Sweet corn, tomatoes, beans, shishitos and cucumbers….yum!
It also means the “heavy” season is upon us. This is the time of year we start harvesting off all the carrots, potatoes, and winter squash to put into storage. We started in on the potatoes and carrots today, and I’m beginning to wonder where we’re going to fit everything. My shop is already so full of onions, I can’t get in and out of it. And a single bed of potatoes yields over 300 pounds….we have about 36 beds left to dig. And the carrot bed we dug today produced about 480 pounds of carrots, and we have 27 beds of those left. And I don’t even want to count the number of winter squash I see poking out of the green foliage out there…my back is getting sore just writing about it.
As a kid growing up on a farm in Connecticut, it was common in the summer to not have lettuce, because is was just too hot to grow it well, and it tended to taste very bitter. So, about mid summer our green salad would change to “summer salad”, which was thinly sliced cucumbers, onions, and cubed tomatoes, sometimes with celery or basil thrown in, marinated in red wine vinegar and olive oil, with a pinch of salt. So, in keeping with that tradition, this week I’ve been making my own version. Thinly sliced cucumber and onion, sungold tomatoes chopped in half, and raw sweet corn kernels cut straight from the cob. Add a little apple cider vinegar for the marinating effect, some balsamic vinegar and that Glory bowl dressing from last week, and a pinch of sea salt. Very refreshing and delicious. And if that doesn’t do it for you, you’re in luck, because we have salad mix in your shares this week as well. Yet another great reason to live in Montana!
I still get a lot of questions about shishito peppers, and I’m convinced there is a “best” way to prepare them. It’s simple and delicious, and here is the recipe. Otherwise, very few ingredients this week even require cooking, which is perfect for the warm week we seem to have on tap.
Enjoy the weather, and we’ll see you at CSA pickup!
Todd and the Two Bear Farm Team
