Harvest Newsletter

Thursday morning garden tour for weekly listing

Greetings from the Garden!  This week's CSA box has mini greens, cucumbers, onions,  tomatoes, beans, cabbage or broccoli, potatoes, ripe bell peppers, melon. basil, and sweet corn.

Old lettuce seed Ken saved

 Field Notes.  Fall greens are growing! Ken has been thinning for two weeks for salad greens.  We usually have a couple weeks in August when lettuce is scarce.  Lettuce loves cool and damp;  When we get hot it bolts and becomes bitter.  But the micro and mini greens are a nutritional power house!  And Ken will add some lettuce that popped up from some very old saved seed.  Our saved seed has much higher viability than purchased seed.  It seems seed becomes more expensive and less viable and not true to type.  We save more and more seed as time passes.

The rain this season has been amazing - LOTS of it.  It is a far cry from the many years of drought we have had.  There can be problems with so much rain.  Melons are not so sweet, raspberries are pummeled to the ground or become soft and a magnet for either picnic beetles or spotted wing drosophilla - a new arrival from Asia.  The male has spotted wings and the female has a serrated back end so she can cut a hole in ripe fruit and lay eggs.  Soft fruit is vulnerable and we saw this last season for the first time.  Due to wet weather one year the fall squash and pumpkins were like water balloons and did not keep well.  We just have to wait and see!

From the Kitchen.  Ken has been whipping up several tasty meals - what he is calling "nightshade bake - a combination of eggplant, peppers, tomatoes with onions, garlic, and summer squash that he bakes with some grated cheese on top.  It was delicious with a side dish or sweet corn.  

He has also cut kernels off left over sweet corn and used it in savory chowders with onion, potatoes, spicy meat and red peppers.  And speaking of peppers, this is the week to make some stuffed peppers!  They freeze well for future meals, too.

'Til Next Week,  Judith