Sweet Corn and Tomatoes
Our returning shareholders will recall our issues with these two crops last season. We made some mistakes and we had some misfortune.
Our corn rows were too tightly spaced and were toppled by a heavy windstorm. They made a strong effort to recover, only to be ambushed by critters, stealing or mutilating nearly every ear.
Many of our tomato plants encountered an even more elusive enemy: persistent herbicide. It was ironic, with all the energy we put toward avoiding any pesticide or herbicide spray, that we would ultimately lose hundreds of crops to something like glyphosate (but mysteriously not glyphosate). We were baffled to see our plants’ foliage curl, crumple, and club into an unrecognizable deformity. Our county extension office investigated, ruling out any fungal or viral pathogen. Our property is surrounded by a treeline, which made it unlikely that drift from neighboring conventional agriculture was a problem.
It seems our mistake was incorporating barn litter, consisting of a good accumulation of hay, straw, and animal waste, into our first few summer garden beds into which we transplanted tomato plants. If this is a strategy we wish to retry in the future, we have to be much more strict about where we source our hay and bedding.
This season, our sweet corn harvest is arriving about as early as can be expected and our field tomato crops are off to a great start!
Your week 7 produce box ought to include the following:
Sweet Corn
We are awfully relieved to have full ears to share this week. We planted six rows of five sweet corn varieties in an effort to extend our harvest window and keep everybody shucking for a good while. Our early super sweet variety going out this week filled out nicely and will surely be a tasty summer treat raw, boiled, or grilled.
Zucchini
We are harvesting summer squashes every day now. Yellow courgettes ought to be available soon to compliment the rich green zucchini.
Kale
We’ll revisit our kale patch this week. It’s a cold season crop and doesn’t perform its best in the heat of July, but we still have leaves to share. Oil them up and cook them into crispy chips or get those nutrients in a smoothie.
Specialty Peppers: Banana & Shishito
Our specialty peppers have been reluctant to flower, seemingly more-so than last season. The plants seem healthy, but the production is slow right now. To encourage more production, we have to pick what’s available. This week, we’ll distribute yellow Banana peppers and wrinkly green Shishitos as they’re ready and available.
Green Bell Peppers
We’ll have a couple fresh green bells for you to stuff, slice, or dice up into this week’s meals. Last night we roasted some Carmen peppers with rice and cheese and it did not disappoint.
Eggplant
We’re started picking mini aubergines to share. We don’t eat eggplant very often, but we’ve been happy with the following quick stove top preparation:
Peel skin (our preference)
Cut into quarters, longways, making thin slices.
Dip in egg wash
Roll in breading: bread crumbs, crushed crackers, etc.
Fry on medium heat until each side is golden brown.
Beans
Our 100 foot Dragon Tongue row is quite prosperous. Like many other summer vegetables, they require daily monitoring and plucking. Our purple and green beans, on the other hand, are being topped by some critter: deer, rabbits, or groundhogs. We’re harvesting what green and purple beans are still available but have not seen the continuous flowering we would hope for a sustained harvest. We’ve planted a succession crop hopefully to make up for current losses.
Rosemary & Thyme
We still have cool season herbs hanging in there and we will distribute them as they’re available.
Cherry Tomatoes
The fruit sets keep coming and they’re ripening faster than we can snag them. Expect a generous portion of sun golds this week.
Full-Sized Tomatoes
We’ve started pulling full-sized tomato varieties. This week, we have pink slicers, red slicers, and big pink heirlooms. We don’t yet have each variety for each shareholder, so we will distribute as available. You can expect either one big juicy fruit or two smaller slicers. They’re ideally ripe when they’re mushy and a consistent color throughout. Because our tomatoes are grown in the field, in order to avoid too many blemishes and imperfections, we’ll often harvest before peak ripeness- when color has started to turn and there is some give to the fruit when you squeeze. If you receive a fruit that still has some time left to ripen, leave it on a windowsill for a few days or put it in a brown paper bag with an apple (check on it frequently).
Eggs
We are unfortunately back to a half dozen eggs this week. Laying hens have been hard to come by and while we ought to have enough birds on paper, the egg production numbers haven’t been adding up.
As we’ve discussed before, this can be on account of a number of issues including this summer’s tenacious temps. We’ll continue to do our best to get the numbers back up to where we’d like them.
Flowers
We’ll have more bouquets for your table featuring Sunflowers, Amaranth, Cosmos, Zinnias, Celosia & Black-Eyed Susans. If you have any jars that you could share, we could use them to help refill our supply.
We love this time of year! Have a wonderful week.
Erin & David