In the share this week:
2 lbs tomatoes
1 lb rainbow carrots
1 lb green beans
2 eggplant
1 salsa verde mix bag and 1 bunch green onions or
1 head garlic and 1 bag salad mix/1 quart pickling cucumbers
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
Green beans are finally here this week! It's a bit late for our first picking of green beans because we were trying something a little different this year. As our first succession of bean plantings, I planted pole beans for the first time to see if we could get some smaller, more consistently weekly harvests. Well they've only been putting out a few beans here and there until this week. Luckily, our first bush bean planting is also ready to go this week, so we have plenty of beans for CSA. Since we are harvesting from two different varieties you may notice some really long beans in your bags (those are the pole bean variety) and some shorter beans (the bush beans). All of these beans are stringless and quite tasty. There were just a few random roma beans in with the pole beans too, so you may see a larger flat type bean as well.
If you've never tried roasting green beans, they are pretty delicious. I found this side dish recipe with roasted green beans and carrots that would be absolutely beautiful with the rainbow carrots:
We decided to bag the rainbow carrots this week instead of bunching because their tops were getting weak. Most of you probably don't use the tops anyway, so that works :) The rain we had Sunday and Monday is a nice recharge for the farm, but I'm noticing that some of the fungal disease that had been held at bay by the dry weather is quickly taking hold. Much of this is expected. Our first zucchini and cucumber plantings never last through July before succumbing to disease. We do have a last cucumber planting that is starting to flower and will hopefully produce a few more cukes in August and we put in a fresh zucchini planting last week, but I'm afraid the plants got fried before they were able to establish. We just started another round of seeds just in case.
Our eggplants are chugging away putting off so much gorgeous fruit. I know this can be a tough veggie for people to use, so I wanted to share my favorite way to prepare it - Baba Ganoush! If you like hummus, this is a silkier, smokier version. It really is best made with grilled eggplant for max roasty flavor.
The tomatoes are producing really well and the cherry tomatoes are starting to come on pretty strong too, so we should have enough of those for all of the shares after we return from our one-week break. We've been enjoying them on some BLTs, in salads, and just straight up eating them with a touch of salt. Yum!
Hope you all have a great week!