Storms herald the battlelines between summer air and the advancing autumnal armies. Nights are cooler – we added a blanket, but refused to close the windows. The sun is coming out later and dipping out earlier, leaving us in the dark for the opening of our early Farmer’s Market harvest, and clipping out formerly productive field time from days’ ends. The mosquitoes are subdued by cold spells and renewed by rainy ones. One recent sundown, we grumbled at a flock of geese that seemed suspiciously southbound.

It’s hard not to start these with weather talk. Maybe there’s no reason to fight it – after all, it’s at the center of growing for you. (Although I have no such excuse for the alliteration.)

After the success of Okra Fest last week, we had to follow it up with Eggplant Fest – where we celebrated the featured vegetable with varied dishes, up to and including dessert. The eggplant incarnations were uniformly tasty: spicy grilled to parmesan crusted baked, smoky baba ganoush, tomato/eggplant relish, and a chai-spiced eggplant pudding. (There were going to be eggplant chips but they took a wrong turn and were abandoned.)

This is how we party now.

The pudding was perhaps surprisingly delicious – especially as it had to compensate for its gray coloration … next time we may brighten it up with some garden huckleberry.

I know I promised / threatened to bombard you with eggplants this week, but we decided to send out just a couple, since we couldn’t fit everything in the boxes already (which is why your watermelons and leeks are ala carte).

(Plus, we ate a ton of them.)

BOX(+) 13

• Leeks – Our first ever harvest of these! Giant onion-grass stalks. If you want to be able to separate the layers, chop off the root end and separate them. Try Googling up a recipe for leek soups, pastas, confit, galettes, pesto … and crispy fried leek greens.

• Watermelon – Yours may be red or might be yellow, but it should be sweet and delicious regardless. I’ve noticed that the seeds can be downright tasty and crunchy when they’re small.

• The Return of Salad Mix – Green & Red Lettuce, Arugula, Pea Tips, Mizuna, Baby Kale That’s the biggest arugula I’ve ever seen – yet still tender and mild. The lettuce is also tender but large-leafed – great for a chopped salad.

• Tomatoes – The plants in the field look like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree for the most part, but there are still fruits ripening…

• Ground Cherries – A team of three people spent the better part of a day first harvesting and then sorting out the bad from the good ones, so that your bag could consist of the tastiest possible fruit!
• Sweet Peppers
• Eggplants (Italian & Asian)

• Kohlrabi – Don’t miss this one – it’s an unusual and worthwhile treat. Lots of ways to eat them but raw is simplest and great, just sliced up and maybe salted or peppered.
• Peppermint and/or Chocolate Mint – You can make tea if you want to, but wouldn’t you rather make a mojito?
• a couple of Cucumbers
• a Zucchini – the storm has passed, and these are on the wane.
• Chicken of the Woods (Large Shares only)  – Kristin found this growing on a tree  next to our driveway during harvest – there was not enough to split up between everyone unfortunately! Wash, slice up, and sautee it with butter. Don’t wash it down with booze. Nope.

Box 12

• Carrots –  We restrained ourselves from harvest early young carrots all season, so they could grow up like these!
• Savory (nope that’s not Rosemary – maybe next year)- would be good with potatoes and with spaghetti squash. You could throw the whole thing into simmering soup, and then fish our the sticks later.
• Red Potatoes

• Spaghetti Squash – Halve it, scoop out the seeds, roast in the oven like any winter squash (or microwave it). Scrape out the strandy innards with a fork to use however you like … we like it with a light sauce like butter, parmesean, and herbs. Maybe some chopped and drained tomatoes; a lot of people try spaghetti sauce, but it kinda just turns it to a pile of mush.  You could also make fritters – combine the cooked flesh with an egg, salt, pepper, maybe herbs, and a little flour. Fry little patties of the results in a pan.
• Beets – a random mix ofThee-Root Grex, Cylindrica, Detroit, Chiogga, Burpee’s Golden, and Red Ace varieties
• Sweet Peppers – Even the scary red ones that look like giant cayenne peppers are mild this week!

• Tomatillos & Cherry Tomatoes
• Beans – Probably the final beans of the season, but some of the later-producing varieties might surprise us, 

• Zucchini
• A lovely slicing cucumber, or two
• Onions

• a single ear of Heirloom Sweet Corn –  You are now fostering a Rescue. The second patch of sweet corn was decimated from above by birds and from below by rodents. Only a few cobs made it through unscathed.

  

  Kristin is harboring suspicions about even the hummingbirds, although woodpeckers are a more likely culprit. Anyway – with just a cob, I’d just cut it off the cob, and add to something else – a salsa, soup, salad …

• Tomatoes – Cursed early blight is wiping out our field crop, inexorably … rage, rage against the dying of the tomatoes!

ugly tomato cart on the way to be preserved

This week the nature that surrounds us really started chowing down on our field, as summer shows signs of weakening and all local life feels the fear of coming winter in our cell membranes.

We, too, are aware of the way summer’s end slips past with such eerie speed, and have started to look at maps, making first forays into planning our snowbird’s flight. Tomatoes are being sauced, corn shucked, beets pickled, and all of it canned up for us to eat over the winter and early spring, when we’re separated from our garden’s fresh sustenance.

Of course, we’re not the only ones loving the garden. The cabbage luper larvae – cute little green caterpillars – are riddling the edible leaves with holes, leaving shotgun blast patterns in cabbages and collards, broccoli and kale. The tunneling voles have taken to increasingly brazen surface raids, gnawing into melons, tomatoes, edamame, beets, potatoes, carrots … pretty much everything.   Mice are raiding all the structures and vehicles, seeking places to nest and steal/stash food. Mosquitoes are desperately seeking the protein they require to bring forth descendants. The rabbit population seems to be held in check by the local gang of coyotes, which sing a bloodlusty song into the night whenever a mammal is made a meal.

Everybody’s hungry –  hopefully including you, gentle shareholder – because we’ve taken a whole lot of food away from the critters of the field to give to you!

Box 11

uffins.

While I can certainly understand why most CSAs are content to let the watermelon take up half f your allotted weekly box, we were fortunate enough to have a whole lot of help with today’s harvest, and with the many helping hands making light work, we were able to pack boxes to the brim, with a melon on the side! Much gratitude to the folks who made it possible … Shareholder Amy, Neighbor Marcia, WWOOFers Grace, David, and Sarah, Friends Steffan, Angela, and Aura  …. it really does take a village to raise a farm, and we’re so grateful to be village people with y’all. Or villagers. Whatever. We love you.

Watermelon – We harvested several varieties of melons this week – Sugar Babies, Early Moonbeams, Peace, and Crimson Sweets-  so you have roughly 50% odds of either a red or a yellow fleshed melon. Let us know if you’re is particularly delicious or not-delicious, so we can have some feedback on our attempts at determining how ripe they are before harvesting!

Ground Cherries – Not actually a cherry, really a sweeter relative of tomatillos. If you haven’t had these before, you’re in for a treat I hope. We had a lot of awesome help for harvest today, so we took the time to really sort through these and remove most of the unripe or damaged fruits. Peel off the husks, or pop them out by squeezing at the back near the stems. Enjoy plain as a snack, or add to pancakes or muffins …

Tomatoes – We are trying to give you as many beautiful heirlooms as we can fit into the boxes, while the plants are still producing them like this … it won’t be long before this seasonal abundance falters, and we all start the annual process of missing them until next year …

Potatoes (All Blue variety) – These do maintain their unusual color even when cooked! How often can a scoop of mashed potatoes look stunning?!

Edamame – Did you practice last week? Here’s the bonanza we promised you … you can do the standard boil/salt/snack thing, or take the time to shell them, cook them, and add a delicious protein into a stirfry – now or later, if you freeze them!

Onions – A mix of red, white, and yellow.

Cucumbers

Zucchini / Summer Squash

Peppers – hot and mild mixes –  The hotties are in a plastic bag, while the mild ones are loose in the box.

An eggplant –  Yours might be green, greenish, purple, or white, skinny or clublike or chubby. Whatever it looks like, it’ll be good!

Collard Greens – One of the crops being munched up by baby cabbage luper moth – we picked the best-looking leaves, but they still bear holes … perfectly edible, just cosmetic damage – made possible by organic pesticide-free growing practices!

Italian Basil          

Yard-Long Beans (Large shares only) – As novel as they are at these incredible lengths, it still seems to work best to cut them into smaller bits before serving … although it’s still kinda fun.

The early summer lull, so rejuvenating after the frantic labors of Spring, is no more – the garden has caught up to us, and is firing vegetables at us faster than we can catch them or take cover. In Spring, we harvested everything available to fill your boxes – now, we have to be choosy, and not harvest all kinds of perfectly delicious veggies. (And even then we’ll harvest more than can be fit inside, and you’ll get a cabbage and a bag of edamame on the side …)

The weeds are getting uppity, and going into seed production mode – no more mulching the field with their corpses, we must remove their millions of future weedlings, to appease the future-us.  We’ve pulled out many cubic yards of ragweed, pigweed, smart weed, lambs quarter, bindweed, foxtail, quack and crab grass, hell, every kind of grass that exists in this region. If we consider it entertainment and not just work, we’re really getting one heck of a good deal with it all.

The tomatoes of the field are being slowly consumed by early blight – soon, they will be Charlie Brown Xmas trees. Heirloom tomatoes are sadly prone to disease, and once blight is introduced it spreads inexorably. We trim off spotted leaves daily to slow the advance, and will be fortifying them as we can with the stuff tomatoes thrive upon. Inside the high tunnel, the plants are looking much better – the biggest problem has been trellising failure due to the weight of them.

The cucumber beetles that pillaged the garden this spring have subsided – although their larvae remain in the soil feeding on the roots, the adults are scarce enough that we have good hope for the second planting coming up now; when we remove the covering fabric so they can be pollinated, the plants will be large enough to better withstand a beetling, which should be mild at worst at this time of year.

The mosquitoes are another story … they’re active all day many days, and there is no shortage of them. However, we floated down the Saint Croix for a couple hours on Sunday, and oh my god the skeeter gauntlet we had to run to get into and out of that river gave us both PTSD and the perspective needed to never complain about the relatively benign suckers on the Farm again.

Finally, this was the week that canning began! We pickled some okra, 14 pints of beets, and put up some cabbage/pepper relish too. Let us know if you’re looking to buy extras of anything for your own preservation projects – if we can, we’d be happy to hook it up!

Box #10: a fine box, indeed.

Carrots – 4 varieties, 2 colors this week … a quirk of planting led to an abundance of fascinating forked shapes for your entertainment.

Edamame – Snack on it! Boil in salted water until the pods turn bright green (~4 min), toss with more salt if you like salty, toss and serve hot, warm, or chilled. Practice this week – more are coming!

Cabbage – Savoy or Red varieties. If it’s not red, it’s the Savoy. Savoy is a more tender leafed cabbage, while the Reds are sturdier. We often like eating cabbage fresh – it’s crunchy and sweet. Perhaps try a with vinegar-based coleslaw? I recommend sauteeing it in a a pan with some onions, salt and pepper. Serve over egg noodles and invite us to dinner.

Tomatillos

Peppers

Tomatoes – an heirloom medley, yo.

Eggplants – Asian and Italian – See the newsletter title! Eggplant is a seriously undervalued veggie in this culture … get on board the eggplant train. Or be pushed in front of it.

Onions

Zucchinis

Cucumbers

Sweet Corn – Eat it now! Or soon anyway. The longer you wait, the more sweet sweet sugar is converted to less sweet sweet starch. I like it raw, but many people boil it first, or nuke it. The primary advantage is making it hot enough to melt delicious butter all over.

Herbs: Basil, Fennel, & Savory – wash your basil before you use, because we didn’t get to it this week!

There’s a mimic bird around here; last year, it was a rusty hinge. We spent some time trying to figure out where the door or piece of equipment was swinging in the wind before realizing the “screee” also happened when there was no wind. Turns out that catbirds are notorious mimics and in our hood. This year, the resident catbird is into the loud “beeep” of the solar power inverter being overtaxed and shutting down. Hijinks ensue; I hope the bird is amused.

The days have been hot but not ridiculous – it’s definitely summer, humid and steamy … and the mosquitoes have been loving the moisture. For our new screen porch, we thank the gods, as well as Craigslist Free listings for the porch, Patriarch Jim for construction, and my departed Mom for financing the deck materials. We went and foraged some chantrelle mushrooms to eat down by the River, and were grateful for the lesson nature provided us there – namely, that as voracious as the skeeters are at the Farm, they could be so, so much worse.

A lot got done this week. We weed-whacked down the spring salad rows, and then tilled under the remains and old hay mulch (thanks Neighbor Dave!).

That completed, we transplanted out the next wave of recruits from the greenhouse: broccoli & cabbage mostly. Kristin hunted squash vine borers, which we’d lured into “trap crops” – varieties of plants they love mostest, which she pulled out and dissected, wiping out the hellspawn within.

We trimmed diseased tomato leaves from the plants in the field – we’re not having a great tomato year (more on that in a future newsletter) like last year, but they’re doing OK, moreso in the high tunnel.

The WWOOFers learned the joys of hay mulching (ie sneezing, itching), which they’d all missed out on in the springtime.

We helped The Neighbors tidy up the grapevines in their vineyard, and drank and made merry.

It was a good week on the Farm – with a good box to cap it off:

Box 9

Forecast called for a cloudy, rainy harvest – so of course it was a steamy, sunny harvest, 90 degrees under bright blue skies.

CSA Harvest days have been downright pleasant and fun lately, with time for a delicious lunch and room to chat before heading to the Cities.

Halfway through the season now, and we have a pretty reliable regular Tuesday crew going now (between the Senior Sehrs, Neighbor Marcia, friends Steffan & Angela, and WWOOFers Sarah, David, and Grace).

As we all work through the weeks the process flows more and more smoothly … we even slept in until 7:00 today!

It left us enough time to fill your boxes to the top with freshly harvested:

Sweet Corn: It might have been just a touch early to harvest, but it should be sweet and tasty even if kernels aren’t as big as they might have gotten. But waiting a full week would have been too long for some of it, so que sera, sera; there will more next week, unless the raccoons figure out how to get past the electric fence … (PS the photo at the top of the page is actually a corn stalk, not an alien. They grow backup support roots when they get tall … and some of our popcorn is over 10 feet now!)

Okra or Cauliflower – The okra is doing even better than we thought it would – there aren’t a ton of plants, but they’re so tall that we’ll soon need a step ladder, or stilts perhaps to harvest them.

Since there wasn’t enough cauliflower to give a full head to everyone, we randomly distributed one or the other. You probably know how to use the cauliflower – if you got a purple variety, the color does remain even through cooking (unlike the beans). A farmers’ market customer that grew up in Georgia told us, in her thick lovely accent, that ours is the best okra she’s had – and she’s been buying us out of it. So if you’re ever going to try this sometimes intimidating southern staple, now’s the time. If you put the pods in a pan whole and cook them, they won’t be slimy. Then you can cut them up as desired. Or, you can slice them the long way and grill them, slice them crossways to make nifty little star shapes that can be breaded with cornmeal and flour and salt and pepper (this is how Georgia does it, and says she just snacks on it like popcorn). If you didn’t get okra yet and want to try it out just let us know!

Tomatoes: If the sides are a little bit soft, it’s probably ripe. Or that’s how I’ve been judging them lately with some success anyway – color doesn’t help as much with so many varied shades of heirloom.

Zucchini – Now that you’ve had a couple of weeks to practice, we’re starting to slowly increase the levels of zucchini in your boxes, much like gradually boiling a frog alive.  No, ok they’re not bad – very versatile veggies, with an incredible range of possibilities – but oh boy do they produce a lot when they’re on their game like they are now.

Onions – You like them.                                                       

Cucumbers – The cucumber beetles have greatly reduced yields, taking out many plants entirely and stunting the rest – this time of year, their larvae are down in the soil feeding on the cuke plant roots. We hate them, but it’s not all bad – we’ve had a few good weeks of cucumber abundance, and the experimental fall crop in the high tunnel seems to be coming up nicely. We may try some late season sugar snap peas in the gaps in the cucumbers’ cattle panel trellising …

Potatoes – The reds are finished up early, but with a strong showing – enjoy them in potato salads with the onions, or baked, or fried. You probably have plans for them.                         

Thai Basil – nice herbal addition to Asian dishes! Add it to stir fries after turning off the heat, or add into noodle salads. Or just sniff the bag.

Peppers – Same mix as previous weeks roughly. Now it’s the waiting game, watching the other varieties of pepper and waiting them to ripen past the green stage into fully-flavored reds, blacks, and yellows.

Beets – It’s been a good beet year! I can tell because we’re letting you have some – in previous years we had to guard them with our lives and save them for pickled beets.

Beet Greens – One of the finest of root crop greens. We like to make salads with sautéed beet greens and roasted beets together. (Neighbor Marcie loves beets with cottage cheese, but I don’t know what she does with the greens – perhaps we will find out.)