• Farm News - Hot summer, slower fall
• Recipe suggestions: about green tomatoes
• U-pick, and this week's share 

Farm News

Fall is here for sure – short days, lots of rain, and low temperatures resulting in an anticipated slower growth of the crops. Your farmers plan, keep notes, adjust where needed. Over the winter we update our farm plan with new crops or new varieties, compare harvest notes. The result is a very large spreadsheet we call our farm plan, that guides us through the growing season. It tells us when to start seeds in the greenhouse, when to anticipate the transplants will be ready for the field, and most importantly, when they are ready for harvest.

This growing season has thrown us a couple of historically unusual climatological events. First of all, the major snow in March stayed on the ground much longer than normal, pushing our first field planting back for more than a month – it’s simply impossible to prep ground that is too wet. And although the quick early CSA season crops kept up with our schedule (spinach, lettuce, mesclun, etc.), the longer season early crops (like the carrots) were way delayed.

And then we had these stellar growing conditions in August and early September, where the long stretch of very warm weather and regular rainfall resulted in crops racing to maturity, while they should have been caught in the anticipated mid-September cool-down. So produce was ready for harvest earlier than historically deemed reasonable. The result was some very abundant late summer shares, but consequentially, the pickings right now are a little bit slimmer. Sorry for that. There’s only so much we can control: the quality of our seed and transplants, our soil prep, the way we handle the plants after  we set them out in the field, for example. Even with 15 year growing experience behind our belt, we’ve got to admit that this year the weather won from our planning skills …

That said, we are still bringing some very nice produce to the sites. CSA farming, with its inherent diverse choice of crops, has build in contingencies to make up for weather related planning flaws. With our farm approach closer mimicking the diversity seen in nature, it’s not surprising to be able to keep on harvesting through the season.

If you are still with us reading through those long paragraphs, we appreciate your understanding! Enjoy this week’s harvest,

Your farmers,

Raymond and Sara

Recipe suggestions - Green tomatoes 

 In this week’s share you’ll find some green tomatoes. You can wrap them in paper bags, store them in a pretty cool and dark place and wait for them to turn red (which they will do, check them regularly), and have some very late tomatoes from your CSA, or you can experiment with some of the many green tomato recipes you can find online, from the classic fried green tomato, to green tomato and cabbage relish, or a green tomato cake (or pie).

From our experience with earlier batches of green tomatoes, expect a different taste experience compared to their ‘ripe from the field’ counterpart. Or have your taste buds pleasantly surprised when you take the green tomatoes to the dessert recipes!