Dear Common Thread CSA Members,

We love this time of year when there are melons, tomatoes, red/yellow/orange peppers, eggplant, green beans, zukes, cukes: all the summer vegetables that we usually only eat fresh and local this time of year and wow are they great!  It's hard to believe that fall is just around the corner but that will bring good things too.  The zukes and cukes don't last long into the fall but the tomatoes, eggplant and peppers are in hoop structures that will protect them even after the first frosts.  

We still have fall shares available so members with summer shares who would like to continue can do so (just let us know asap) and we can also accept new members. Fall brings potatoes, celery, winter squash, brussel sprouts, celeriac, leeks, spinach, kale, onions, garlic and more.

We are in tomatoes!  We are growing a lot of red tomatoes and some pink and yellow tomatoes.  We also have several heirloom varieties this year, including Copia (yellow with red stripes), Cherokee Purple (medium/big pink/purple), German Johnson (big pink), Black Velvet (small and purple/black), and Persimmon (orange).  

The cherry tomatoes, which are a pick your own crop, are also coming along nicely. We put them under a caterpillar tunnel this year to get a longer picking window and give them better protection against late blight and they are doing great! We have four varieties: Jasper (round red cherry), Montesino (red grape tomato), Toronjina (round orange cherry) and Mountain Magic (red cocktail tomato).

We stopped canning tomatoes about 10 years ago when we learned that tomatoes freeze easily.  We just slice them up and put them in  freezer bags.  We make tomato sauce out of them later, often also adding peppers that we froze the same way.  We add tomato paste to thicken the sauce.  We sometimes also boil tomatoes down and put them through a food mill and freeze that, which is less work than canning but more space efficient than freezing tomato wedges.  

We love it when the colored peppers come in.  They are so pretty and tasty.  We eat them raw in salads and just all by themselves and we add them to salsa and tomato sauce.  They are also great grilled, roasted and stir-fried.  One of our favorite ways to eat them is Asher's  stovetop roasted peppers.  Asher scorches ripe peppers directly over the flame of the gas stove.  He carefully moves them around with a pair of tongs until they are pretty much blackened all over.  Then he lets them cool and removes the scorched skin from the perfectly cooked flesh. Then he adds oil, vinegar and salt and we eat it in sandwiches, on pasta and really on the side of just about anything - so good.

Wendy and Asher