Not a lot of time for a newsletter so lets make this succinct.
We need more employees, fewer deer, and less rain.
If anyone is interested in getting out of the house for a couple of hour per week let me know. We could certainly use the help! After this week we will be down to three people (from the original six). After next week we are down to two. Booming economies make finding farm workers difficult. Spread the word!
The deer are eating our watermelons. We never had this problem before. Sure we had crows eating the melon. Absolutely we had deer eating other plants. But never deer eating melons. I’m not sure what changed in their dietary needs but it will severely impact our melon production.
All this rain is too much. Plus the forecast calls for more! You’d think rain would be good for farming and it is. But with the constant rain and constant moisture the diseases have an easy time taking hold and spreading quickly. I’m sure all this rain is good for some crop, I just don’t know which one it is.
What will we have this week? Ok, this week we will have the Bodacious corn. We thought it would be last week but it just wasn’t maturing. The cool days, which are great for many reasons, are not so good for sweet corn. They like it hot! So it took longer than usual to mature. But it is finally here and tastes great! We’ll also have a pile of tomatoes, eggplants, summer squash, some broccoli (yes broccoli in mid August!), cauliflower (see below), cabbage, potatoes (if we can harvest them with the waterlogged soil), a few carrots, fennel, onions, a few beans (we are between plantings right now), and a few other things I don’t recall.
We have FruitShare, CheeseShare, EggShare, IceCreamShare and FlowerShare this week.
A quick note on cauliflower. I think the cauliflower tastes great this year. Store bought cauliflower is usually quite white compared to ours. We don’t wrap the leaves to blanch the heads. We found that enclosing the heads leads to greater disease pressure. Store bought cauliflower is wrapped to protect it from bruising and dehydration. We don’t have a way to wrap cauliflower. So it can get occasionally bruised and discolored. And with all the rain and damp weather we’ve had it can get a bit a black stuff on it. But it tastes great! So my recommendation is to give it a try and use it soon after you pick it up. And to help you use it here is a great recipe I made the other day.
Grilled Spicy Cauliflower (recipe derived from Grilled Spicy Cauliflower on Serious Eats)
- 2 teaspoons kosher salt (we thought this was too salty)
- 2 teaspoons ground turmeric
- 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
- 1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1 head Cauliflower chopped into bite size pieces
- Olive oil
Mix spice ingredients together. Coat cauliflower in olive oil and spice mixture (we used about half the amount from this recipe) then put into heavy aluminum foil; leave foil open. Put cauliflower on a hot grill. Cook, flipping occasionally, until slightly charred. Close up the aluminum foil to trap steam. Steam cauliflower until tender. It is quite delicious and you don’t even notice the cauliflower wasn’t blanched!
That is all for now. Feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions, etc.