In the share this week:
1.5 lbs mixed tomatoes
1 lb red long onions
1 bunch celery
Sweet pepper mix
Poblano or jalapeno peppers
1 lb zucchini
2 lbs mixed eggplant
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
It's been a full week in our home and on the farm! Our three kids started back to school this week, each at a different school this year. It's our last year with a kid in elementary school, which feels really big right now. So between getting everything ready for school, the usual farm work and working the farmers market last night, I'm just now getting around to writing the newsletter for this week :)
We have been continuing to work on getting our fall transplants into the ground, and I have to say that I'm really pleased with the quality of the plants we are putting out. It's notoriously hard to have nice fall transplants, because the greenhouse gets too hot and insect pressure can be a problem as well. Thankfully, our new lean-to greenhouse seems to be performing quite well and churning out some really nice brassica transplants. We planted out green cabbage and lacinato kale last week and just put in some napa cabbage and kohlrabi yesterday. To be extra sure these babies have the best start, we immediately cover them with insect net or row cover to exclude cabbage butterflies and harlequin beetles (our biggest problem pests for these crops). So far everything seems to be taking well, despite the heat that doesn't seem like it's going away any time soon. We are fortunate to have continued to have a good amount of rain in the last few weeks to keep everything watered in well. We'll be continuing to prep beds and get more crops planted during our CSA break next week. Fingers crossed for a bountiful fall!
This week is still heavy on the major summer crops. We are having a bit of a dip in tomato production, which is typically around this time as we wait for the next flush of green tomatoes to ripen up. We should be back on in full force in a few weeks and will probably have lots of tomatoes to share with you, as well as a late cilantro planting if all goes well.
Since it has been such a bumper eggplant year, we are again giving those this week and I thought I'd share a couple of different recipes to try if you haven't yet found your go-to eggplant dish. The first one here uses so many of the veggies from your share and is delicious on toasty bread.
This next dish features asian flavors and would be extra delicious served over noodles. You can use up some of your garlic from previous shares if you still have that around:
One note about the celery in your shares this week. I've been very disappointed to see that these plants are suffering from a leaf spot disease this year. We had such a great celery year last season, although it was uncharacteristically dry, which probably helped the plants stay healthier. The stalks still look really good, but the leaves aren't so pretty. There is no danger in eating these leaves if you cook them and they still have great celery flavor. We are hoping that by cutting back the stalks heavily right now and spraying an organic treatment that helps the plant fight off fungal disease, we'll have some nicer stalks to share with you in future shares!
Hope you all have a great week!