It sure is feeling more like fall these days as we approach the equinox and the beginning of longer nights than days. Though we're still quite busy in the processing kitchen putting up salsas, soups, and whole roasted tomatoes, things are getting much more manageable with the hottest 100 days of the year behind us. Tomatoes continue ripening at a good rate from the hoophouses, with 16 houses still planted to tomatoes, and 6 that have been cleared out and planted to fall crops like kale and chard. Outdoors, we're all done planting, we still have some weeding to do, and we're mostly waiting for the last of the summer crops to finish up.
Speaking of summer crops finishing up, we're having a great year for one of my favorite crops--winter squash. Not sure why, but between light insect pressure and moderate growing conditions, both our patches of winter squash are really kicking it out, especially the butternuts, of which I think we'll harvest upwards of 20,000 lbs on less than half an acre. The acorns have been affected by powdery mildew and seem to have stopped short of a huge harvest. Still, each plant has 4-5 nice squash, and I see that section yielding somewhere around 12-15,000 lbs. And the quality is very nice, with very few culls and lots of perfect looking fruit. What a difference from last year, when the cucumber beetles were completely out of control (even though we sprayed every day for weeks), and we lost half nearly half of our planting. Even those plants that did survive last year didn't do the greatest. This year, things look strong, healthy, and high yielding.
All this squash is forcing the issue on something I've been thinking about for some time now--a large commercial type freezer. All the years I've had to freeze things, we've used chest freezers, which are kind of cheap and poorly made compared to a larger walk in freezer. Plus, they don't actually freeze things very fast; they just keep things frozen, so one can't put very much in one at a time. Last year we invested over $20,000 in a new, much larger walk-in cooler, and now I'm thinking we should invest nearly half that on a bigger/better freezer.
What's the connection between winter squash and a freezer? Those of you who were with us for our winter CSA share last year probably remember the quart Ziploc bags of frozen winter squash. We got great feedback from the vast majority of customers, and we're looking to do more of it this year. It took us a while to figure out how to best and most gently cook the squash, and get it into the bag. After a few different approaches, we found that cooking the squash as we do onions in our salsas and soups worked great to cook the squash minimally, and make for easy and quick processing.
We simply cut up the squash into somewhat equal sizes, scoop out the seed cavity, put it into a 10 gallon pot, cover it, and bake for about an hour and a half at 450. The result is a heavily steamed/lightly roasted product that retains maximum nutrition, and that is very easy to scoop the flesh from the squash skins. It goes very fast this way, and we retain maximum nutritional value.
The regular way of roasting squash, in open air, dries the squash out some (I know you can put water on the baking pan, but it the water evaporates like crazy which is not good when doing large quantities), and makes it much more difficult to scrape the flesh away from the skin. Additionally, even though this dry/drier roasting that we don't do does caramelize the squash better, the hotter temps do denature the resulting squash a little more by cooking at a higher temperature. We want to process minimally and give you the option of cooking more later, or leaving it as is. For those of you with infants, this stuff makes fantastic and very cheap baby food!
Enjoy the tomatoes and peppers as much as you can; summer crops are fading fast, and fall crops are right around the corner.
-- Chris
