In the share this week:
1 lb mixed tomatoes
1 bunch rainbow carrots
1+ lb sweet onions
2 eggplant (pictured below)
2 zucchini or squash
1 cucumber
1 salsa verde mix bag or 1 small garlic and 1 bag salad mix
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
This is a colorful share this week and there are so many items that I'm excited about! Our eggplants are the healthiest plants we've ever grown and are producing fruit earlier than usual. We are growing three varieties this year, the standard black italian globe shaped, a stripy purple and white italian variety, and a long thin asian type. All of these are producing like crazy right now! It's hard to know exactly why some years are better than others for certain crops. It could be that these plants loved the early hot weather and weren't too bothered about it being a bit dry. It could be that our transplants were extra healthy and got them off to a good start. Thanks, by the way, to our homeschooler group that planted all of these on a Thursday morning back in May :) In any case, we'll enjoy the lovely crop this year and make all of the eggplant things.
The second of the beautiful, colorful crops this week are the rainbow carrots! These are a mix of purple, orange, red and yellow carrots and this is another crop that looks like our best ever. The bed these are growing in was recently plowed up to make it deeper and ammended with some soil mix that we had been getting from a local microgreens grower. Often times, the colored varieties are carrots do not fill out as well as orange varieties and just are overall a bit weirder. These varieties haven't had as much breeding and selected as the orange types, so they are just more wild. However, it seems like given perfect growing conditions, they will do pretty well too. So we are very excited to give you some extra lovely rainbow carrots this week. There should be enough to give in shares next week too!
The third item I'm excited about this week is less colorful but lots of fun - salsa verde mix bags! We aren't quite picking enough tomatillos for everyone in a week, so the Tuesday and Wednesday shares will be getting these this week and next week it will be the Thursday and Saturday shares. These salsa verde bags were something that Steve and I received as CSA members ourselves while in grad school. In your bag you will find a pound of tomatillos, 1 clove of garlic, 1 jalapeno, 1 banana pepper, and 1 small onion. I really love to make a roasted salsa, so you could generally follow the recipe in the link below, or you can just roast all of these items together at 350 for about 30 minutes before blending them together in a food processor or blender.
Unfortunately, the spring cilantro is long bolted so we don't have any of that to add to the bags currently. However, I'm seeding a new round this week and I'm hoping the crop will last into late summer when we may be able to add cilantro into the bags too. If you happened to freeze any from our spring crop, you could definitely add that. Or if you don't like cilantro this salsa is still delicious without it.
We have so many awesome crops this week, I haven't even mentioned the tomatoes yet. They are starting to come on strong, so we have lots of extras available in the store to add or swap in your shares. This week is such a classic summer veggie week, so I'm thinking a ratatouille would be a perfect way to use your eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes and sweet onions!
Hopefully you aren't getting sick of the onions by the way. We use so many in our house that I assume other people do too! I really love these sweet onions. This will be the last week we'll have them fresh. We are drying some that will be available in a couple of weeks though. Our garlic is now dry and cured and our two beds of storage onions will soon be harvested and headed for curing as well. All of the sudden, this summer seems like it is just speeding by us!
Hope you all have a great week!