Onions. What recipe doesn’t start with onions? That’s why we plant enough onions so that every week you receive onions. In the early part of the season we give out scallions — onions with green tops that don’t bulb. We give these out potentially all season long, as long as we have some left to give out and the time to harvest and wash them.
As the bulbing onions start to form bulbs — though still growing with green tops — we harvest them and wash them — leaving the green tops on — to make them look nice. We did this this season with a new red variety called Cabernet. We thought it performed reasonably well so we will probably keep it for next year.
Eventually the bulbing onions’ tops start to die; the tops dry up as the bulbs continue to grow. Once the tops die — which signals the bulb has completed its growth — we harvest and “cure” the onion bulbs. We put them in the greenhouse with the exhaust fan pulling in cooler air from the outside. This gives the onion tops time to completely dry and seal up and the onion skins to loosen as the bulb dehydrates a bit. Once cured we cut off the tops and rub off the outside layer of onion skin to make them look nice.
Unfortunately there is a time between washing the green top onions to make them look nice and peeling the skin off the cured onions to make them look nice when we don’t have an easy way to make them look nice. Getting the dirt off when they are between the growing stage and the cured stage is a challenge. If we were to wash them for you we could introduce pathogens into the onion that would cause it to deteriorate. Plus we’d get the dry skin wet which could limit its ability to store. So we don’t. Peeling the tight skin is quite challenging. So typically at this time you’ll get dirty onions. I suggest leaving them dirty until you are ready to use them, then wash the dirt off. Boy that was a long-winded explanation as to why the onions are dirty.
The yellow onions we are currently giving out are called Candy. I think the name is apropos. They are a sweet onion with a mild flavor. Raw or cooked they are quite tasty. Sweet onions typically do not store for long periods but can typically last a month or two. So plan to use them every week. We’ll eventually get to the storage onion — much more pungent with limited raw use potential but with excellent cooking potential — sometime in the fall. Storage onions can store for 6-12 months depending on type and storage environment. But most people find them to be too strong when eaten raw.
Enough about onions. What else will we have this week? We will be switching to the last variety of sweet corn. It is a bicolor corn that is very sweet with a pop of sugar in every bite! We’ll also have tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, eggplant (sorry there will be more eggplant), carrots (if we have the weather to allow us to dig them), maybe peppers, a few remaining summer squash/zucchini, cucumbers, okra, garlic!, some cabbage, beets, a bit of fennel, a few kohlrabi, maybe basil, maybe chard and maybe some other things I don’t recall. Oh, and we are getting close to watermelon season!
We have fruit this week. It will be a mixed box but if you are interested we can get boxes of all Colorado peaches. If you’d like to swap your mixed box for an all peach box — no charge — please let me know by 5:00 pm Monday. The a la carte price for a 10# box of certified organic Colorado peaches is $49. If you’d like to order a la carte please let me know by 5:00 Monday as well.
CheeseShare, EggShare, IceCreamShare, SeafoodShare and SalmonShare all arrive on Tuesday.
CoffeeShare arrived late last week.
BreadShare is every week.
We have a local source for raw milk. Let me know if you are interested.
We will take back the pint clam shells from the blueberries (or other same size clam shells). We use them for our cherry tomatoes. If you have pint — and only pint size — clam shells please send them our way. We’ll also take back the fruit boxes. They work well for harvesting tomatoes. We are pretty set on egg cartons for a while.
As always do not hesitate to contact me with questions, concerns, suggestions, jokes, etc.