Week #11!
In Your Share This Week
- Basil
- Cabbage, savoy
- Cucumbers
- Eggplant
- Onions, tropea
- Red Slicers
- Summer Squash
- Sweet Corn
Crop Highlights
Basil: Yum! I can never get enough basil in my life. The aroma of basil in our packhouse after harvest is one of the most joyous things about the summer. Eat it with its tomato companions, or make pesto! Like last year, we decided to put the whole plant in your share, saving us time and also giving you more. We recommend keeping your basil on your countertop in a glass of water, and using it within the next few days. Its ideal storage temperature is around 50 degrees, so best not to keep it in the refrigerator. Enjoy 🙂
Cabbage: Our kale wasn’t looking so hot this week, so we decided to sub Savoy cabbage instead. This pretty green crimped cabbage is sweet, tender, and cooks quicker than other cabbages.
Red Slicers: Tomatoes are finally here! After a cold, wet spring which forced us to push tomato transplanting back a couple of weeks, we are as excited as you are about their juicy ripeness! We have been growing New Girl and Big Beef as our slicers ever since I have been working at SIO; they prove to be delicious and reliable year after year. The heat and dryness of the past two weeks helped spring our tomatoes into action, and hopefully there are not more crazy temperature swings in store for us for a while (70s and 80s feels like paradise!), as tomatoes do better with consistent warmth. Right now the plants look great, so expect to receive tomatoes at least through the end of August!
Summer Squash: Our green, striped, and gold zucchini are still heavily producing! Like a lot of our other summer crops (eggplant, cucumbers, tomatoes), we decided to plant fewer zucchini this year, with distribution in mind for our CSA only. It’s working out nicely: a crew of 4 people can go out for 2-3 hours and harvest all of our ‘hot crops.’ We do this on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, to keep up with the fast paced growth of these veggies. Zucchini can amazingly get baseball-bat sized in a matter of days!
Remember to check out Katherine’s recipe blog for new, delicious cooking tips:
http://www.cookwithwhatyouhave.com/sauvie-island-organics-recipes-tips/
The Packhouse
All of the photos shared with you this season have thus far been of our fields, so I thought I’d change it up this week! Our packhouse is a key structure at the farm. Post-harvest, we bring everything to the packhouse, give it a light watering down if necessary, and wheel it into our walk-in refrigerator. In the afternoons, those of us who work in the packhouse will hand-truck our stacks of veggies out of the cooler and onto the packhouse floor, where there are tubs or tables designated for washing certain veggies. Once washed and packed accordingly, back into the cooler they go! While it can get kind of hectic in the packhouse from time to time, it is also organized and runs smoothly, thanks to everyone’s experience and attention. Jen and Jesse must be pro Tetris players, because they somehow are always able to fit the stacks of bins and boxes in our cooler when it seems impossible (those of you who pick up your shares at the farm may have an idea of how crazy our walk-in can look sometimes). We hope to make a time-lapse video of it some day!
Photos taken Tuesday, August 15th:
1) Betsy offloading salad mix and other greens.
2) Inside our walk-in. Not too full right now!
3) August power washing ‘reds’ at our bin washing station, next to the packhouse.