In the share this week:
1 bunch beets
1 bunch salad turnips
1 head radicchio
1 bunch green onions
2 lbs watermelon radishes (pictured below)
Mix of sweet peppers
1 lb red tomatoes
1 little gem lettuce
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
We had the first frost of the fall this morning! My friend and flower grower at Blackberry Ridge Flower Farm, Kari, likes to refer to the first killing frost of the season as Frostmas :) The frost we experienced here was fairly light and didn't totally kill some of the frost sensitive weeds around, so I'm not going to call this Frostmas quite yet, but yet it does feel like we have turned a corner. We are working on pulling out the tomato and pepper plants in the hoophouses to make room for our winter greens crops (spinach and kale mostly). I like the work of deconstruction and clean up at the end of the season. The plants have been in the ground since late April or early May, and are tired and ready to be done (just like the humans :) Yet even as we pull them, we are able to glean a surprising amount of good fruits. The full sized green tomatoes will eventually ripen up in storage, but we'll probably give some green ones in shares next week in case some of you are fried green tomato lovers :)
We have some beautiful chicory/radicchio in the share this week, but I can't for the life of me figure out which variety we planted! They are much bigger and leafier than the varieties we usually grow and it just doesn't seem to line up with any of the seeds we had in the inventory. In any case, you can use this leafy green in many ways, including raw in salads or cooked. Some folks really like to roast radicchio to soften the bitterness and bring out its sweetness. I found a couple of recipes/general info about chicories and radicchios below:
The bitter nuttiness of radicchio would pair especially well with the last of the beets this week. Mixing in some citrus that is just coming into season, would be wonderful!
I've been especially pleased with the quality of our salad turnips this fall. I bought a new precision seeding plate for my fancy Jang seeder and it seems to be seeding out the turnips just about perfectly so that we are harvesting 1-2 inch beautiful roots, with very little maintenance. In the past, we were stuck with overseeding them and having to thin, or using our paperpot transplant system, which is hard to get right in the fall and sometimes left us with overgrown and misshapen roots. Yay for small wins!
The first of the watermelon radishes (pictured above) are out in share this week! These are a winter radish variety that stores for months in the fridge. I love to simply roast them with salt and oil, but they are also great thin sliced and eaten raw, or quick pickled and added to sandwiches, tacos, etc! These roots have a light green exterior and a bright pink interior, so they make for a fun splash of color in late fall and winter. I hope you enjoy them!
Have a good week all!