In this week’s box:
Heirloom tomatoes
Slicer tomatoes
Sungold cherry tomatoes
Bell peppers
Sweet Italian frying peppers (only hot peppers were bagged, so all loose peppers are sweet!)
Hungarian hot wax and jalapeño peppers (everyone got three hot peppers which were bagged to differentiate them from the sweet peppers; one green jalapeño and two Hungarian hot wax)
Kale
Basil
Scallions
Red lead lettuce
Green beans (everyone got one of two varieties: either French filet beans which are thinner or stringless green bean)
Garlic
Fruit share: Gala (redder apples, great for fresh eating) and Cortland Apples (has more green to it than gala and a tarter flavor). All apples come from Downing Fruit Farm in Darke county.
Farm notes:
When we started Mile Creek Farm six years ago we didn’t really realize how much we would depend on machinery. We also did not realize how when you regularly use machinery you also regularly fix machinery because everything breaks at some point! And at least 75% of fixing machinery is knowing how it works so that you can figure out what is causing the problem.
Turns out that it is much the same in the fields. We plant the same crops every year and sometimes they thrive while other times they don’t. It is incumbent upon us to figure out why they thrived or failed and to determine if we can influence future crops positively.
Last week we noticed a problem with our final planting of summer squash which was supposed to go in the ground tomorrow. When we watered the seedlings squash bugs poured out of the plants. Literally more bugs than I could count! At that point there was nothing that we could do for that planting of squash. It simply wasn’t going to make it. In fact squash bugs have plagued our crops this year like never before. So we have to talk to other Organic growers and figure out if there is something that we can do to control them in future years.
Recipes
Chili Con Carne