We're heading into the final stretch of summer and the heart of our summer share season. Many crops are yielding well, and it's sometimes hard to choose what to put in the box. We've been solving that problem mostly by not deciding and putting everything in the box. This is the time of year that the greatest variety of crops is coming in, and because many of the ingredients, like peppers, potatoes and onions, go well together, we're including them in the box.

The first of the year's peppers are here (see the photos to the right). Among the sweet peppers, there are green/turning yellow bells, and purple Islanders with green interiors. All have been harvested fairly young, enabling the remaining peppers on each plant to really size up before they ripen. I suspect there will be sweet peppers in the box now through late September.

We also included one of our milder hot peppers--the New Mexican (Anaheim) pepper. These are doing very well in terms of quality and quantity. The peppers are nice sized and noticeably hot (they're usually a little too mild for me). These are the peppers we put in our fire roasted salsa, and that are traditionally roasted every fall in New Mexico, where the varieties were developed and are primarily grown. With a little caution, you can use these like bell peppers, but prepare for a modest bite. On the Scoville scale which rates the heat in hot peppers, they're definitely on the mild side.

Potatoes are in the box, finally, now that we're received our new barrel/drum washer. There were a few glitches setting it up, and it doesn't operate quite like I thought it would, but overall it works well and saves us lots of time. The potatoes we washed for this weeks' box weren't as fast as the carrots, beets, and turnips we'll wash down the road as we needed to wait for the potatoes to dry before packing them. But overall, we're happy to have the washer here and operating. I had to attach a closed cell pad to the inside of the rotating steel drum where the crops are sprayed to minimize bruising during loading and washing of produce, and the results are promising. Note that the washer scrubbed the potatoes nicely, exposing the flesh in some spots; you might want to refrigerate this batch for longer life.

Everything else is doing well. We're between broccoli harvests as I suggested we might be last week. We did cut some mesclun that we had to allow to get larger than we'd like because it didn't germinate particularly well, and so was a bit sparse and had to grow a little larger and taller and fill in a little better before we could cut it. The cutter/harvester we use depends on a fairly dense stand for efficient cutting, and so if a seeding is not as dense, it needs to grow larger before its leaves are dense enough to cut. Eggplants continue on despite potato beetle pressure. We had planned to include thyme this week, but had to wait as we continue to get frequent rains that foiled our harvest efforts, but it will happen soon. Lettuce plantings are maturing and will be in the boxes again in a week or two.

We've got more onions in the box this week. This kind we call long reds, or torpedo onions. They've got a great flavor and texture, a little different from other onions. They remind me of shallots, yet are big enough to use generously. In the weeks to come, we'll have regular red onions, and the aforementioned shallots, as well as large yellow onions. After being in the field for a few hours the other night, harvesting onions up until dark as we were expecting a rain the next morning, I noticed that the some onions had wet layers characteristic of either thrip (our bug nemesis for onions) damage or wet weather "sogginess." We'll have to go through them after leaving them in a greenhouse for a few days to dry out and cure as onions need to do. We'll use the bad ones in our processing kitchen and the good ones we'll include in the CSA boxes in a couple weeks.

Tomatoes are coming on strong now, so expect a steady diet of slicers, romas, and small fruit through September.

We're done sowing transplants for the outside growing season, and sowing for the fall hoops has begun. We've got a few things left to direct seed for fall, including beets, two kinds of turnips, and two kinds of radishes. Our main fall carrot planting came up, slowly with all the cool weather, but fairly well. For now, we're hoping for drier weather for our final plantings. 

                                                                             -- Chris