The strawberry season has come to an end for another year, but what a fantastic harvest it was!
Now we’re moving into pea-picking season here at the farm. Sometimes the strawberry and pea harvests overlap, but every season is different. This year, the peas are running a little later than usual.
We’re now harvesting all three varieties of peas: snow peas, sugar snap peas, and shelling (English) peas. Snow peas and sugar snap peas can be eaten whole after removing the stem ends. Shelling peas, on the other hand, need to be removed from their pods before eating.
We’re not yet sure if we’ll have enough of all three varieties for everyone. If supplies are limited, we may offer a “pea choice” option for the CSA, allowing members to select two of the three varieties for their share.
We are rapidly winding down on the lettuce season for the 1st half of the year. We have 2 varieties left out in the field to pick that are looking good despite the heat and lack of rain!
After these two varieties have been picked, we will not see lettuce in the shares again until September when it starts to cool off.
The warm weather really gave the zucchini a boost this spring! We were surprised to start harvesting them so early, but we’ll have enough to include them in this week’s CSA shares. We try to pick a range of sizes to suit different cooking and baking needs. Smaller zucchini are perfect for grilling, sautéing, or enjoying fresh, while larger ones work well for baking, stuffing, or shredding.
It’s been a strange season for the cabbage. In a typical year, we would have started harvesting it a week or two before the broccoli and cauliflower. This year, however, the cabbage seems to be taking its time sizing up. The heads are nice and firm, but they’re still quite a bit smaller than I’d like. It’s a bit of a mystery. They’ve already surpassed the “days to maturity” listed on the seed packet, so I’m beginning to wonder if they’ll get much larger even if we leave them in the field longer. At this point, I’m still undecided about whether we’ll harvest them for this week’s CSA shares.
We will be harvesting some fresh white onions, though. Over the past few years, we’ve struggled with curing white onions for long-term storage, so we’ve decided to skip that step and include them fresh in the CSA shares instead.
During our crop walk last night, we managed to capture a couple of beautiful photos with the evening sky as a backdrop. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did!
The potato field is full of flowers now. This field sits at the bottom of our farm and always does well in a dry year!
And the sweet corn started tasseling. Only a few more weeks to wait for sweet corn!
New this week and available only once a year is fresh, unfrozen chicken. Our friend raises 1 batch a year and we have available, packs of drumsticks, wings, breasts and whole birds. Anything left after this week will go into the freezer.