CSA Newsletter

Greetings from the Garden!  This box has tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, Walla Walla onions, garlic, zucchini or zuchetta, cabbage and or kohlrabi, lettuce, greens  - radicchio, beet thins and or arugula, basil, carrots,corn and apples.

Field Notes.  What dramatic weather swings!  Wen we have 70 on Sunday and 90 on Monday the plants go into shock.  Chickens lay fewer eggs.  It has been an unusual and unpredictable season.  With all the early season snow, who would have thought we would be so grateful for any rain we can get right now.  Ken looks at the internet weather map and most times announces it is heading north of us.  Ken has been irrigating the greenhouses, and is planning to irrigate the next location for the mobile high tunnel.  We keep hoping for some rain so it is not necessary.  After Monday's heat it is hard to imagine predicted lows in the 30's later this week!

Harvest time.  Ken spends part of just about every day picking something - tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini, eggplant, apples.  He is tasting the occasional grape as they will be next.  Last week I got most of the elderberries before the birds did!  They are now off the stems and in the freezer for a batch of juice or wine.

The days are now dramatically shorter, and the push is on to get it done.  In about ten days at equinox, the days will be only 12 hours long - seems short after about 15 hours in June.

From the Kitchen.  Ken has been in the kitchen.  He made a pie from all the apples with blemishes.

He pickled some peppers and made a batch of spaghetti sauce on Sunday night.  

I made a batch of corn chowder with corn cut off the cobs.  I cooked some bacon, sauteed onion and red pepper in the bacon fat, added some sliced cabbage, cooked corn cut off the cob, and added some milk and herbs - thyme and savory.  I served it topped with chopped bacon on top


With the weather swings I am using the oven on cool days and then making cucumber salad, sliced tomatoes, and other no cook food on the hot days.

'Til Next Week, 
Judith