Harvest Newsletter

Greetings from the Garden!  This week's CSA box contains the following: tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, potatoes, beets, carrots, cucumbers, beans, and basil.

Field Notes.  Onions are curing in racks with garlic and there are more to pull.  Ken is focused on both current plantings and fall plantings.  As the days shorten, he needs to figure out how much sunlight is required to grow fall crops and plant accordingly.  

We are most grateful for the rain last weekend.  Each time Ken starts to plan to irrigate crops that are short on water, we get rain.  The rain started slowly and all was absorbed into the soil rather than running off.  The plentiful rain does present other problems - a new an very hardy crop of weeds.  Ken has been cultivating whenever the soil is dry enough and there is some sun to bake the weeds so they don't just regrow.

From the Kitchen.  Now that we have all the hot weather crops it is time for one of our favorite summer dishes - Ken's upside down pizza.  Warm a flat pan - we use a large pie plate as you mix up some biscuit dough and slice up vegetables and herbs.  Ken places some olive oil in the pan and layers vegetables starting with the ones he wants to cook longest and hottest.  He uses eggplant, peppers, summer squash, onions, garlic and tomatoes.  Then he covers the vegetables with biscuit dough and bakes at high heat - about 400 - for the time it takes to cook the biscuit dough.  Remove from oven and flip.  top with grated cheese.

We have also been cooking up vegetables in the morning and popping eggs on top.  For example, this morning I sauteed onion added green pepper and red cabbage.  Then after adding the eggs, I placed a couple plum tomatoes cut lengthwise on the griddle cut side down.  It was a beautiful and tasty way to start the day!