In Your Share This Week:
- Basil
- Chard
- Corn
- Celery
- Cucumbers
- Eggplant (on rotation)
- Onions, Tropea
- Summer Squash
- Tomatoes, Slicers & Heirlooms
Crop Notes
Basil: We love this fluffy large-leaved variety. We have found that it tastes much sweeter and less pungent than other varieties of basil. If you don’t plan on using up lots of basil relatively quickly, we would recommend turning it into pesto or something similar, as it tends to turn brown and black due to the chill of home refrigerators.
Celery: This week we are distributing the last of our early-summer celery. Due to some less-than-ideal germination in the greenhouse back in early April (yes, celery takes a long time and a lot of patience to grow) we have less celery available than we had aimed for. We still want you to enjoy the tastiness of local celery, so we are putting it in the share by large/small head size. That means you may receive a head of celery that has been cut in half. Enjoy!
Corn: This week we are featuring a mixture of white and yellow sweet corns. We have been finding that they appear to have cross-pollinated, so you may also recieve bi-colored corn as well! Also its late summer, which means…CORN BORERS!!! Now we know that peeling back the husk to find a caterpillar munching on your corn isn’t the most sought-after thrill, but its an unavoidable fact of late summer Organic corn. This pest was much of the impetus for biotech companies to genetically modify corn- the result was Bt Corn. Bt (aka Bacillus thuringiensis) is a bacteria that occurs naturally in soil and is an Organically acceptable insecticide product that is available for Organic farmers to use against insects like corn borers. Monsanto found away to engineer Bt directly into the corn, so the plants produce their own Bt that destroy corn borer larva. Long story short, if you find corn borers in your corn…you know its not genetically modified! And as always, we grow all of our crops without insecticidal, fungicidal, or herbicidal sprays (we do however enlist armies of mail-order ladybugs to help us out from time to time).
Summer Squash:This week officially marks the end of our summer squash season. Goodbye until next season!
Tomatoes: We received this interesting article from a CSA member in regards to tomato storage. We admit to falling fairly firmly within the ‘no refrigeration’ camp, and store our tomatoes in a cooler thats kept at 50 degrees. Maybe you can do your own experiments at home to see if you find a difference one way or another. We’d love to hear your results! As a general tip, the red slicer tomatoes have a somewhat drier flesh than most of the heirlooms do, so if youre looking to do some canning or dehydrating, the slicers may be the better choice- and save the heirlooms for fresh eating (although you certainly can preserve them as well, they just have a higher water content).
