Share 9 - week of July 21st
In the share this week:
1.3 lbs mixed tomatoes
1 bunch celery
1 bag Roma beans
1 lb sweet onions
1 small garlic
1 bunch sweet basil
2 slicer cucumbers
1 pint cherry tomatoes
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
We were just basking in the glorious weather today! We even felt good enough to be a bit silly while pulling some weeds out of old onion landscape fabric (pic above as evidence). We pulled out the last of the onions to cure on Monday and now we are ready to seed a new crop into those beds (fall carrots!). It feels really great to turn over beds quickly like that, especially when the weather is ideal for seed germination. Even though we are still in the middle of summer, we'll start to plant more crops for fall over the next few weeks. Carrots are a pickier one, and they really need to go in in the last two weeks of July or the first week of August at the latest. Fingers crossed we'll have a nice fall crop this year. The last few years have been rather lackluster due to some fungal disease on the carrot leaves.
I wanted to draw some attention to the gorgeous celery that we've had the last couple of weeks. This is hands down the best celery we've ever grown. Celery is a crop that is particularly sensitive to uneven watering, so it really performs best in a high tunnel where we can tightly control how much water it receives. Grocery store celery is nearly always grown in very dry areas and irrigated. While we have planted celery in our smaller tunnels the last few years, the side beds do receive a good bit of water when it rains. So last years' crop really struggled with various fungal diseases. The humidity in our area makes it tough to win the battle with the fungi, but we're doing our best to put up a good fight. We are just thrilled with how beautiful this celery is coming out of our brand new big high tunnel. We are just cutting the outer large stems, so we're hopeful that we'll be able to continue to harvest this crop for many weeks to come (fingers crossed).
With the weather cooling off just a bit, I made a Tuscan farro vegetable soup for farm lunch today. It combines celery, tomato, onion, garlic, carrots and I threw in some cabbage we still had on the Farmer food shelf. Here's a recipe for ideas. Use the celery greens in lieu of the parsley. It was scrumptious!
https://www.themediterraneandish.com/tuscan-farro-soup/
The cherry tomatoes have really started pumping this week, so we are excited to share some with you! We've been making lots of simple salads with tomatoes and cucumbers and I'm thinking something like this recipe below, which also includes basil, would be easy and delicious.
The beans everyone is getting this week are the flat style Roma beans. Use these any way you'd typically prepare green beans. They are particularly good in an old fashioned green beans, potatoes and ham type dish (one of our kids fav meals). Or you could add them to the vegetable soup recipe above! I'm sorry I didn't think of that today for farm lunch :)
Have a great week everyone!