In the share this week:
1 kabocha squash or pie pumpkin
1 bag carrots
1 lb red onions
1 lb green beans
1 small garlic
1 bunch cilantro
Mixed sweet peppers
2 jalapenos
1 banana pepper
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
It seems like all we can talk about this past week and a half is just how gosh darn nice the weather has been. These are the glory days of working outside! We've also had a string of dry days which means that we have been able to crank on all of the weeding that we needed to get caught up on. We had a heroic task of handweeding four 100 ft. beds of carrots last week, and we just finished up the last bed this afternoon. The carrots will be worth it and there are so many of them in the beds. Many of the fall crops are looking really good (cabbage, kale, peas, lettuces, radicchio, turnips, radishes and more!), so I'm feeling hopeful for some bountiful harvests over the next couple of months.
The struggle of late has been the raccoons that are taking a few too many tomatoes. I had noticed some evidence of these sneaky buggers in the last few weeks, but we were harvesting so many tomatoes it didn't seem to matter much. Now that we are in between big flushes, every partially ripened tomato I see on the ground is galvanizing me in the war against raccoons! We are having to pick the tomatoes at earlier stages of ripeness, just to make sure they are getting them. I'm also attempting to trap them, with no luck so far. It really bums me out, because our summer planted cilantro is gorgeous this week and I thought it would time up nicely with some red tomatoes. Fingers crossed for next week, but in the meantime we do have the most beautiful sweet peppers and it turns out you can make a pretty tasty salsa with those! I would add all of the peppers in your share this week:
The green beans we are picking this week are mostly the roma, flat pod style. These have great flavor and can be used anywhere you'd use a regular green bean. We've been really happy with our beans so far this year as they are not getting eaten up by mexican bean beetle larvae that can be such a devastating pest for us most years.
We tried a new winter squash this year - kabocha squash! This has a really tasty and meaty flesh that some people compare to sweet potato. I had high hopes for it, and initially it looked like we had a pretty nice crop. However, when the vines started to die back and we harvested the squash, we found so many of them rotten, or bug damaged. So sadly, after sorting through the 'good' ones we only had enough for our Tuesday shares this week. Happily, our pumpkin crop did pretty well and the butternut squash crop is really awesome, so we do have more yummy winter squash to share with you in the coming weeks! For preparing any type of winter squash, a great starting place is simply to roast it (see recipe link below). You can then, either eat as roasted wedges, or you can scoop out the flesh and use in another application (pie!). The rest of the shares this week will be getting a larger pie pumpkin. These pumpkins usually store well for several months, so you can definitely use it for decor before you eat it later. The kabochas likely won't store long, so cut those up and eat them soon.
Hope you all have a great week!