Happy Labor Day weekend! We will, in fact, still be laboring on Labor Day- but this is a much smaller CSA pickup week, which should give us a little more room to work through our bulk tomato requests.
Tomato orders will be filled in the order they were received. We’re hoping to knock out quite a few this week, especially for folks who selected this week as one of their preferred pickup dates. As always, the exact number we can fill will depend on how many tomatoes are ripe and ready!
Please watch for a text from us the night before or day of pickup.
Around the Farm
Last week was a flippin’ blur. I know we harvested a truly ridiculous amount of produce, but beyond that, I’m not entirely sure what happened.
José, Rodrigo, and Alfredo are still steadily weeding the carrots for winter, and our winter crops are looking okay overall. Meanwhile, we are still very much in the thick of warm-weather harvest. The peppers are going strong, while we’re harvesting a minimal amount of eggplant and still a good amount of tomatoes.
Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes!
The eggplant, unfortunately, is beginning to wane due to disease. The eggplants themselves are still perfectly good to eat, but the plants are struggling, and production is beginning to slow down. The tomatoes also went downhill quickly after last week's rain. High humidity creates ideal conditions for plant diseases to spread, and we’ve lost a few crops to it this season- or at least watched them decline much faster than we would have liked.
Thankfully, other things are still going strong. Our final planting of green beans is looking good, and we’re hopeful it will give us one more nice round of beans before the season ends.
We’ve also been mowing, mowing, and doing still more mowing. It is one of the necessary evils of keeping a farm from being swallowed whole this time of year.
Finally, we have a few new people joining the crew! Kirsten, Jessa, and Semma will all be starting with us, and I’m excited to get to know them and have some fresh energy around the farm. We’re still hoping to hire another two or three people, but it feels good to have a few new folks on the way.
And while we’re talking about how precarious farming can be, I also want to mention Jacob’s Fresh Farm in Dexter. I know Jacob better as a friend of a friend; his parents have a small Christmas tree farm just down the road from us, and he has done a wonderful job building a farm of his own. This year has been especially rough for them, though, and Jacob is facing spinal surgery recovery and upcoming double hip replacement surgery on top of the farm’s production and financial struggles. Plus their second child is due in November. If you’re near Dexter or Chelsea, please consider visiting their farmstand or learning more at jacobsfreshfarm.com or https://www.facebook.com/Jacobsfreshfarm
This Week's Harvest
If you do not customize, you will receive the Farmer’s Choice Share this week, which includes theitems marked with asterisks (**).
Standard/Alternating/Monthly Shares: select up to 30 credits
Large Shares: select up to 60 credits
For this week:
Apples: Blondee and Gala!
Blondee is sweet and mellow, similar to Gala but lower in acidity and with just a hint of spice.
Beans**: likely just green beans for Wednesday, but this might expand to green, yellow or Dragon's Tongue by the weekend.
Cabbage- green or red. Likely for the final week for a while?
Carrots**: our late-summer planting is ready! These are likely going to be orange, but may be a mix of orange and rainbow.
Celery- consider chopping it up and freezing it for later/winter preparations too.
Eggplant - Mini only this week. Others are on break.
Garlic
Hot Peppers -
Mild to Medium: May include jalapeño, Anaheim, serrano, Golden Dagger, and chilaca/pasilla.
Medium to Hot: All the above plus red habaneros and cayenne.
Poblano: a lovely smoky-flavored pepper. Traditionally made into chiles relleños but also great in a deconstructed version that is less work.
Kale
Green curly only
Leeks- mild and slightly sweet with a gentler onion flavor. Great sautéed, roasted, added to soups, mixed into potato dishes, or used anywhere you’d normally reach for an onion.
Onions:
Red: a sweet and simple onion.
Yellow (storage): a more pungent onion
Potatoes, Farmer's Choice: these may be distributed dirty (unwashed)until temperatures change.
Rutabaga - a hearty veggie that can be used like a potato. From the 2025 harvest.
Shishito Peppers- the roulette game of peppers! Most are mild, but every once in a while you'll get a surprisingly hot one.
Sweet Peppers -
Lunchbox/Snackers**: super sweet and in larger quantities than originally!
Bell Mix:a mix of ripe and ripening bells.
Carmen: a red, sweet Italian frying pepper that is one of our favorites!
Cubanelle**:a slightly tangy and almost spicy pepper that we adore.
Tomatillos- traditionally made into salsa verde or green enchilada sauce.
Tomatoes!
Heirloom-Style: Colorful varieties in pink, yellow, purple, green, striped, and more.
Red Slicing Tomatoes: Our classic juicy, meaty slicers.
Farmer's Choice** (one or the other or a mix).
Watermelons! Farmer's Choice**:
Yellow, orange, or red seedless watermelon. Colors will vary based on the harvest and pickup site. Note: Watermelons will not be inside your box, so please remember to pick yours up separately!
CSA Store Extras
Fresh Eggs- limited! Plan to purchase them via Farmigo if you need extra, as they will likely NOT be for sale at our stand.
This is apparently the week of the pepper. Along with our hot peppers and shishitos, we have four different kinds of sweet peppers available: classic bell peppers, long red Carmen peppers, pale green Cubanelle frying peppers, and small Lunchbox/Snacking peppers.
All four can be eaten raw or cooked, but each shines in a slightly different way.
Lunchbox peppers are wonderfully sweet and crunchy for snacking; bells are the familiar all-purpose option; Carmen peppers are especially good roasted or grilled; and thinner-skinned Cubanelles cook quickly and are excellent sautéed or fried.
How to Preserve Those Peppers
If the peppers start taking over your kitchen, Grow a Good Life has a very thorough guide to freezing, drying, pickling, canning, and otherwise preserving peppers. It also explains which methods work best for different types of peppers and what you might actually want to do with them this winter.
It's a little ad-heavy, but the author is very thorough!
