Dig It!

First I want to thank those who came out to help dig garlic. It wasn’t a large crowd — just two people and their time here didn’t overlap. But our work crew put in the time to get it all done by the end of the day. For those who wanted to help but weren’t available I’d like to point out that in a few weeks you can volunteer to process the garlic. It is now curing in the greenhouse and once cured we need help cutting the tops off and sorting it by size. It involves a lot of sitting so might be right up your alley!

Second, sorry there was no newsletter last week. We were down a person so I didn’t have time to put one together.

Third, I am looking for additional help for the rest of the season. If you or anyone you know is interested in working here part time for the next few months please contact me!

Fourth, we are still taking back any pint size clam shell containers (the size blueberries and cherry tomatoes come in). We will fill these up with some of our delicious cherry tomatoes and send they right back out to you!

What will we have this week?

Potatoes! Typically our first potatoes of the season are the Dark Red Norlands — the smallish (though not always) red potatoes but this season the Yukon Gold tomatoes met their demise early so we dug them instead. We also have some cherry tomatoes, some regular tomatoes, some tomatillos, onions, some cauliflower, lots and lots and lots of cucumbers, zucchini (it looks to be slowing down but we’ll see), some okra, some eggplants, some cabbages, some Napa cabbages, a bit of sweet corn and some other things I am forgetting.

It is a Fruit, Coffee, Egg and Flower week. Fruit this week is strawberries, red grapes, nectarines, Dapple Dandy pluots and my favorite Flavor Grenade pluots. I misjudged how many pluots come in a pound so you get a lot of pluots.

A quick note on onions

I should have mentioned this in a previous newsletter for those who are new and those with poor memory retention. Over the course of the season you will receive onions in various forms. The onions mature as the season progresses and so their presentation changes as does what we do with them. Early in their maturity we give them out as “fresh” onions. These are onions with the tops still on. Why do we not cut off the tops? Well one reason is you can use the tops and the second reason is they would dehydrate faster and possibly rot quicker. With the tops still on it is best to store them in the fridge if you want to retain the tops for use. If not, you can leave them on the counter and the tops will slowly dry out.

Once the onions tip over in the field we start removing the tops. When they start falling over they are spending less energy maintaining the tops and putting more into the bulb. So the green tops start turning brown and are less palatable. At this point we remove the tops here at the farm prior to sending them out. The onions are still “fresh” and not cured so they may not store for a long time. You can keep them in the fridge or on the counter.

At some point the onions will reach their final maturity which is when we harvest the remaining onions and set them inside the greenhouse to “cure”. When curing, the onion dries up the remainder of the top and “seals off” the bulb. At this point we remove the top and put them in mesh storage bags. We then send them out to our customers. At this point the onions will store for a reasonably long time.

I guess that note wasn’t all that quick.

A quick note on tomatoes

For those new to the farm and those with poor memory retention I just wanted to point out that we pick our tomatoes at the “breaker” stage of ripeness. Why do we do this? Well, you should read the August 20th newsletter from last season if you really want to know.

Farm News

We finally had enough dry days to be able to dig the garlic, some carrots and some potatoes. Then we got a bunch more rain. It was a much needed stretch of dry weather. All this digging reminded me of a missed opportunity I talked about in this newsletter from October of 2022. Instead of requiring you to click the link I’m just going to fill in the details here. If I was named Doug I would start a farm that only grew root or other below ground crops. I would name it Fresh Doug so I could sell things like Fresh Doug Potatoes, Fresh Doug Garlic, etc. Doing a quick search I find there are no root crop farmers named Doug and if there were they would not be fresh. So still a possibility for all our members named Doug.

Anyway, the garlic is curing in the greenhouse and once cured we will process it and start sending it out. Overall the garlic looks pretty good.

We sent out the carrots last week. Hopefully everyone enjoyed them. We have two more plantings of carrots we will dig sometime during the remainder of the season when it stops raining.

The potatoes we dug on Friday as I mentioned in the “What will we have…” section are Yukon Golds. Yukon Golds tend to be lower yielding than other varieties we grow but they did reasonably well this season. However, as we were washing the spuds we noticed that more than a few — but less than a lot — had soft spots on them. We spent way too much time sorting through the potatoes trying to remove all the bad ones. We hope we got them all but there is no guarantee. I suggest you check your potatoes when you get them and keep an eye on them if you don’t plan to eat them right away. They might store fine but I just don’t know if the problem is in all the Yukon Golds and that is why they died so early or if there are just a few plants with a problem and we culled all the bad spuds.

That’s enough writing for now. Time for me to go back to farming.

Recipes of the Week

One of our members was kind enough to share a couple of the recipes she used last week that she found delicious.

The first one is Chocolate Zucchini Loaf Cake. Once you try this you will no longer complain about having too much zucchini!

This second one sounds interesting to me. It is a quick fennel kimchi! Probably would have been more helpful in last week’s newsletter but since there wasn’t one we just have to put it in this week’s newsletter.

Speaking of fennel, the fronds of the fennel make an excellent pesto. Use your standard pesto recipe but use fennel fronds instead of basil. You should chop up the frond prior to putting them in the food processor so they grind up easier.

I don’t think anyone really needs potato recipes but here is one just in case you don’t know what to do with potatoes. I think this would work well with the Yukon Golds.

Joke of the Week

Why did the farmer bury his money in the field?

He wanted to make his soil richer.

That’s all for this week and last week. As always, feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions, recipes (you too could be featured in a future Fresh Earth Farms newsletter!), pint clam shells and anything epse you think I’d find interesting or helpful.