In the share this week:
1 lb red tomatoes
1 lb yellow onions
1 bag carrots
4-5 sweet italian peppers
3 poblano peppers
1 medium garlic
1 head lettuce (summer romaine, red leaf or summer crisp)
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
Well the obvious thing to talk about this week is the baking heat. Then again, that's not really very interesting and you've probably heard me drone on before about the weather enough in these newsletters :) It's sufficient to say that, yes it is super hot this week, and luckily we got our fall transplants in last week and are watering like crazy to make sure everything makes it through this week intact.
So what I'll talk about instead is the new project we are getting started on this fall. We are building a lean-to greenhouse off of the southeast side of our pack shed! The pic above is the detailed construction drawings my retired civil engineer father just whipped up in an afternoon last week. We'll be able to use some leftover foundation materials from our house build in this new greenhouse, and it will benefit from having the north side being the now insulated wall of our pack shed. We are looking forward to having a really functional and perfectly sized seedling greenhouse for all of our farm plants starts and for our spring plant sale too. For the last four years or so, we've been working out of a usable temporary greenhouse that we built into the hillside. It's been a good little inexpensive greenhouse, but it's a little too small and not very centrally located so we have to run extension cords over to it to heat it in the winter and hoses over to get water to it for a good part of the year. This new greenhouse will bring us more efficiency and pleasant working conditions. An additional benefit of having the greenhouse attached to the pack shed, is that we'll be able to open the door from the greenhouse to the insulated part of the pack shed on sunny days in the winter so that we can use some of that solar gain to heat our workspace. I love when you can stack functions like that! We are breaking ground for the foundation this week and hope to have constuction completed sometime in October. It should be all ready to go for next season's seedlings!
We are still picking a lot of peppers this week, so you'll get more of those deliciously sweet italian peppers along with some beautiful poblano peppers. I was thinking you could do a chile relleno type thing with both the poblanos and italian peppers plus a lot of the other items in your share this week - onions, garlic and tomato. The sweet peppers are nice for those who don't really like any spice. The link is great for learning more about poblano peppers and teaching you how to make authentic chile rellenos:
If you aren't using your tomato for chile rellenos, this would be a great week for some perfect BLTs! Everyone is getting a really nice head of lettuce this week. The lettuces were very happy about the mild temps last week and we are trying to harvest out these beautiful heads before they start to bolt from the intense heat this week. I wish we had more shade cloth this week! We are using it to cover recently planted lettuces along with some cilantro that is almost ready for harvest (look for that in shares next week!)
Hope you all stay cool this week!