August 16
Two colors of snap beans, three kinds of basil, and marigolds.
Four Rond de Nice summer squash and a pile of purslane.
This week's harvest:
NEW: Snap beans! Commonly called green beans, but these are all purple (Kew Blue) or yellow-green (Gold Nectar). Recipes.
Luxury basil bunch -- the green basil is Genovese, a tender Italian variety; the purple is called Opal; and the dark-stemmed, smaller-green-leaves one is cinnamon basil, a little like Thai basil.
A few people got the first of the second kind of cucumbers, called True Lemon, an odd yellow sphere.
Ongoing: Cooking/braising greens include a bunch of chard, and amaranth tips. The lettuce is a half-romaine variety, so the crunchy ribs would be good filled with ?dip?. Purslane, the succulent, can be cooked or eaten raw.
Radishes, carrots. Tomatoes, okra. Everyone got one of our first San Marzano, the classic paste tomato. There aren't a lot of San Marzano per plant, which is maybe how they concentrate the tomato flavor per tomato.
Spherical summer squash (zucchini), called Ronde de Nice.
The last of the giant scallions. The big green tips and tubes are pretty fun to stuff and saute like stuffed peppers. We'll be back to smaller scallions, your classic green onion.
Sorry I was later than usual: there were bees places I wasn't expecting bees. The student farm was practicing honey harvest and I don't know what happened but there were honey drips, including by the washing shed, and bees everywhere gathering the honey back up. I am fine with bees in the field, they're after the flowers and we're all live and let live, but this was a LOT OF BEES in UNEXPECTED PLACES and an UNCERTAIN MOOD. The harvest was more complicated than usual and this was extra.
Storage notes:
Washed and unwashed:
Everything INSIDE the BIG plastic bag has been washed in at least three changes of water and drip dried.
Some crops don't wash well or don't store well when wet, and those will be delivered UNWASHED and OUTSIDE the big plastic bag, possibly in a small plastic bag. Big sturdy things like summer squash will just be loose. Rinse anything outside the big plastic bag before eating.
Basil and cilantro and flowers keep best with their stems in water, like little bouquets, I find. Basil outside the fridge, cilantro in the coolest part of my house or the warmest part of my fridge.
In general: root veg, including carrots, should have their greens taken off, after which the roots like cool dark storage. The greens on our root veg are all edible. Greens like cool humid storage.
Recipe suggestions:
A collection of summer green bean recipes that also use a lot of the other summer produce
Getting ripe for next week:
More of the same! I've also been planting all kinds of cooler-weather greens to see if we can get an early autumn crop of baby kale, spinach, etc. Those won't be ready for at least a month, though.
As I type it is absolutely pouring rain, which could be great for the crops or not. I'll know in a few days.