In the share this week:
1 bunch salad turnips
1 bag spinach
1 bag baby kale
1 lb green tomatoes
Mixed bell and sweet peppers
2 kohlrabi bulbs
2 lbs sweet potatoes
Thoughts from Farmer Anna
This week we are really feeling the change of the season. The leaves are looking beautiful around the perimeter of the farm, it's been cloudy and cool (pretty pleasant working conditions really) and we have started taking out the tomatoes and peppers. It feels like a momentous occasion when these summer crops come out, since we plant them at the end of April, then take pains to trellis and fertilize them through the season, them spend so much time harvesting them. It's also a lot of fun deconstructing and cleaning up parts of the farm in the fall. We are taking these plants out so we can seed spinach, kale and a few other crops in the hoophouses for winter production. It's best to seed your winter crops before Nov 1st and the closer to mid-October the better. I'm hoping to be ready to seed by the end of this week or early next week. We've been making great progress getting our overwintered cover crops seeded and have just 6 more beds to get seeded tomorrow. The winter cover crop mix we are using this year is winter wheat (for soil holding and biomass), hairy vetch and austrian winter peas (both for nitrogen fixation). These three are very cold hardy and will survive our winter temps without any protection. We make sure to only seed them in beds that won't be getting the early spring crops, so they have time to grow and add nutrients to the beds before we terminate them in late April or early May.
Since we are taking out the toms and pepps this week, you are getting both green tomatoes and a mix of peppers. My grandparents loved to make a green tomato relish and my parents have continued that tradition. It's a preserved food that makes a ton of sense to make when you are tearing these planting out of the garden in the fall. Just take all of those veggies, blend em up and add lots of sugar and vinegar! You don't have enough of these in your share for a whole recipe here, but you can certainly improvise and make a smaller batch if you're interested. You don't even need to can it, just stick it in the fridge and eat within a few months. I may also put larger quantities of green tomatoes and green peppers in the store if you are interested in more of those crops. The recipe below is pretty much exactly the one we use:
I hope you liked the white flesh sweet potatoes last week. We have some of the traditional orange sweet potatoes this week. After harvesting out our four beds of sweet potatoes, we weren't super happy about our yields. We've continued to have problems with voles eating through too many of them. Luckily, our guy Cole (who has been working at Rains and Sun since 2019) planting the same number of sweet potatoes at his property in Robertson County, so hopefully we'll have lots more sweet potatoes available through the end of the season and into the off season as well. Since the spinach is back for the fall (yay!) I thought a recipe like the one below would be good:
The baby kale is from a new planting and is really nice this week! I will be eating some in salads for sure, probably with those tasty salad turnips chopped into it. The kids are excited to feed some of the turnips to our new pet rats (it's a long story) so they can share a snack together :)
Have a great week!