It's Tomato Season!

That's right, tomato season has begun. While you're in the field picking cherry tomatoes with your family, look for your favorites like sungold, black cherry and honeydrop varieties to add color and zing to your next meal. Take notice of one of the new varieties this season, indigo rose. When ripe, this larger sized cherry is dark purple in color and very high in anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are powerful anti-oxidants. Keep your eyes peeled for tomatillos that will be ready for salsa verde soon.

The farmers are hard at work harvesting heirlooms to be shared as well. This early you'll find taxi, a sweet yellow tomato with low acid taste. Cherokee purple is famous for it's dusky pink color exterior and multicolored interior with full flavor. Another early variety and farmer favorite is glacier. Originally from Sweden, this attractive red tomato is sure to be your favorite too. Soon we will see the brandywines, pineapple bi-color, green zebra and more.

Striped roman paste tomatoes are perfect for sauce with their meaty flesh and wonderful flavor. Look for the plum shaped ones with bright red skin and golden streaks. The delicious oxheart shaped amish paste tomato is yet another one excellent for sauce. A Wisconsin heirloom from Amish farmers in the 1870's, it is highly recommended for canning.

Don't forget the basil for your fresh tomato slices! Yum!

Jessica Gerani

Official Introduction to this Season's Peppers  

We are approaching some larger harvests of peppers. I want to renew

Islander

your excitement for returning varieties, and pique your curiosity to new ones. We share our peppers in the following categories: sweet peppers,mild-medium heated peppers, and U-Pick hot peppers.

 

In our sweet pepper category, we have three different bell varieties. 'Islander' has been the first to ripen to a harvestable stage with green to violet color change.

 

'Gourmet' at full maturity is a bright orange color,

Gourmet

while 'Ace' will pass through a deep orange phase and fully ripen to red. Since flavor sweetens with ripeness, we tend not harvest green bell peppers since they have not reached full maturity.

 

Also available this year: three additional varieties of sweet peppers. Jimmy Nardello's are an Italian frying

Jimmy Nardello

pepper, named after the seed saver who brought the seeds from Italy to Connecticut in 1887. While the slender elongated red fruit resemble some of our hot varieties, please trust that they are an amazing sweet frying pepper. In fact, they are one of Farmer Dennis's favorites. Two of our new peppers this year are Antohi Romanian, an eastern European frying pepper and Round of Hungary, a specialty pimento

Antohi Romanian

cheese pepper good for stuffing, cooking, or raw.

 

For the mild to medium heated peppers, we are

growing Anaheim and Poblano varieties again this year.   For both of these varieties, while the heat will progress and increase throughout the season, the spice will vary from pepper to pepper.

 

All of the above listed peppers will be harvested and available during upcoming distributions. But we also have hot peppers available for U-Pick. There are five varieties for your picking pleasure. The Cayenne peppers are slender, elongated and mature to red (not to be confused for Jimmy Nardello's). Fish peppers are 2-3 inches slender fruit that change from cream with green stripes to orange with brown stripes with the final stage being red. The Thai peppers are the smallest fruit in the U-Pick Pepper rows. And the final two varieties are Habanero, which are known intense heat and bright orange at full ripeness, and the very well-known Jalapeno.

 

I want to invite you to be adventurous in this pepper season. Try something new!