In the share this week: 1 bag salad mix 1 lbs mixed sweet potatoes 1 bunch salad turnips 1 bunch celery 1 head cabbage or 2 kohlrabi 1 head garlic 1 bunch carrots I'm bad about remembering to take pics of the veg, so please enjoy Pierre the cat in a nest of straw left over from our house build :) Thoughts from Farmer Anna: The end of the season is always a time to reflect. Thinking over the basics of what crops produced well, which didn't, which crops sold well and which didn't, what areas we could improve our efficiency, or make our daily work more enjoyable. Thinking over bigger questions, like, is our farm serving it's mission of growing community with fresh, local organic vegetables? And how do we achieve better work/life balance? (ha!) I think we have gotten really good at vegetable production over the last 11 years. We even added 10 weekly shares on top of the number I had thought was our max production capacity, and it felt like we were able to give some really great shares all season, without any tight spots in production. This feels like an awesome achievement to me, but it means that I'm often not left with any time for the important piece of community building. And boy, do I really feel the profound importance of community right now. Modern life doesn't offer up many places and spaces for the personal connections that we all need. Connecting around food is so core to our humanity, and I really want to figure out how to make space for more of it here at the farm! That is one of the big goals that I'll be noodling on while I plan for the 2025 season. It's possible that I'll need to make some production shifts on the farm to make that happen. Our production capacity and community building goals, will also largely be determined by whether I can find the farm employee(s) that I need to keep this farm chugging along. Along with more volunteer and possibly a part-time opportunity, I'm hoping to find a full-time employee that wants to learn the ins and outs of small scale organic veg farming and will commit to two years with us, before perhaps moving on to start their own farm? It's a tall order, but that is the person I'm hoping to manifest :) I'll send out specific job description and details soon, if you may know someone who would be interested! We are finishing the season off with some really great veggies! I'm sorry (not sorry) to be giving salad turnips again this week. I know you've had them a lot this fall, but they have been such excellent quality that I felt I needed to give some more. We just eat these up so fast in our house - they are awesome raw, dipped in hummus or ranch if you haven't given that a try yet. Today, for farm lunch I roasted some, along with carrots. Then sauteed onions and peppers and threw all these veg together in a wrap with hummus and feta cheese. So simple and delicious! You could also chop up the turnips to eat with your salad mix. They are so mild and sweet, they pretty much pair with anything! This week we are giving a mix of the orange and white sweet potatoes. They would be so pretty cut up and roasted together as a side dish. Or you could use them along with your cabbage/kohlrabi and garlic in an amped up version of pad thai: https://inspiralized.com/sweet-potato-and-cabbage-pad-thai/ If you aren't sure whether you'll use your celery up this week, you could chop and freeze it for use later (maybe in a Thanksgiving stuffing, perhaps?). I've really been enjoying the celery in soups these last couple of weeks. Thanks to each and every one of you for your support of our farm this season! We hope you enjoyed your veggies, maybe tried a new one (or a new recipe), and connected with the people you love over some honest good food. Have a lovely winter season and we'll be in touch!

In the share this week: 1 bunch carrots 1 bunch celery Mixed kohlrabi Garlic Specialty pepper mix Banana peppers or Green tomatoes 2 lbs orange sweet potatoes Thoughts from Farmer Anna: We had a couple of notable things going on here at the farm this afternoon: we started planting our overwintering onions and we received a shipment with the rest of the materials for the seedling greenhouse we are building off the back of our pack shed. (Also, Brandi and Maria gave out these delightfully imperfect 'carrot creatures' pictured above to trick or treaters at the Ft. Thomas Market this afternoon). It's been awhile since we've transplanted anything, and these onions, along with the garlic we'll be putting in next weekend, will be the last of the planting for 2024. Looking back, this was a pretty amazing year for onions. We are typically sold out of all of our onions by early September, but we were able to keep stocked through most of October. I especially love the overwintered onions because they cure and store so well - we have very few losses due to pests and disease in this crop vs. our spring planted onions. Fingers crossed for another good year in 2025! The seedling greenhouse framing is now complete, so we just have to attached the plastic panels, fan and vents so she'll be ready to go for starting our transplants next season. I can't wait to work in this lovely space! For our farm lunch today I made one of our favorites - sweet potato and black bean tacos! I cube up the sweet potato, toss in oil, salt and adobo seasoning, then roast at 400 for 25 minutes. Load up your corn tortillas with the sweet potato, black beans simmered with oregano, sauteed onions and peppers, pickled banana peppers, avocado and some of Steve's special salsa macha for the fully vegan version of this dish, but you can also top with feta cheese if you are inclined. Here's a full recipe that's pretty similar to what we do: https://cookieandkate.com/sweet-potato-black-bean-tacos/ The hoophouse celery has continued to delight us this year! We are cutting some pretty nice size stalks this time around, and the flavor and texture is really quite nice for homegrown celery. We aren't fully cutting the heads, because I'm hoping we'll continue to get some regrowth and can have some winter celery to enjoy as well! I love the idea of making a pureed soup with your carrots and celery this week. Something like this recipe: https://theclevermeal.com/carrot-and-celery-soup/ Have a great week!

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: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/23/bitter-leaves-recipes-radicchio-chicory-puntarelle-yotam-ottolenghi https://thesaltedpotato.com/roasted-radicchio-beet-and-blood-orange-salad/ 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!

In the share this week: 1 head napa cabbage 1 lb yellow onions Mixed sweet peppers 1 bunch lacinato kale 1 bag arugula or salad mix 1 bunch beets 1 bag carrots Thoughts from Farmer Anna: Our family enjoyed a fun trip down to the Smoky Mountains over the kids' fall break this past weekend (Greta, age 11 and Robin, age 14 pictured above walking at the Sky Park in Gatlinburg). It was awesome to take a little time away from the farm to spend quality time together as a family. We struggled to find decent food to eat since we were staying in a hotel, and that is always an interesting educational experience for the kids. The reality of what passes for food at so many restaurants is really pretty sad and disappointing (and expensive!). They are really starting to understand the importance of high quality ingredients and the time and care to prepare them well. We did find a pretty great Thai restaurant off the beaten path, so that was a fun treat for all! After the rains over the previous weekend, we have turned to some really gorgeously perfect fall weather. These are the days that are an absolute joy to be working outside. This week we are working on getting just a few more beds turned over into winter cover crops and may start tearing out some eggplant, pepper and tomato plants later in the week. It's nice to be nearing the clean-up phase of our yearly work, and the farm is starting to look nice and tidy, with the remaining fall crops in the ground and newly sprouted cover crops. The share this week is a really nice mix of fall greens and roots. The beets are back! This crop has been a labor of love, as we protected it from goldfinches with bird netting, it struggled through some brutal dryness and heat, then it got hit by days of clouds and rain. As a result, the greens aren't looking too happy. Both beets and swiss chard are susceptible to leaf fungal disease that are always worse in the fall months, especially when it is cool and wet. Happily, the roots themselves are quite nice, although just a little smaller than our spring beets. I think they would be amazing roasted and whipped up into a salad with your arugula this week (you could even throw in the lacinato kale to the salad if you want more servings): https://www.spendwithpennies.com/arugula-salad/ The peppers are still going strong and we are just so pleased that we've been able to give those so much this season. In the next few weeks we'll be pulling out all of those plants to save the peppers before we get a killing freeze, so you'll likely be getting more too! This is the last week for napa cabbage, but we still have more carrots in the ground (the fall plantings of these have been really nice). Cole starting digging out sweet potatoes on his farm last weekend, so we're getting those cured so they can come out in share for you soon! He grew 3 different varieties this year and they are all looking great!

In the share this week: 2 lbs red tomatoes 1 bunch cilantro 1 lb yellow onions 1 bunch celery 1 lb green beans 1 pie pumpkin 2 banana peppers Thoughts from Farmer Anna: It's official! I transplanted the last flats of veggies that we'll harvest in 2024 today - some salad mix lettuces in one of our hoophouses. We still have a few more beds of quick brassica crops to direct seed over the next 10 days or so, and then we'll plant some overwintering crops (onions, garlic and hoophouse greens) in later October or early November. Planting out the last flats for this year feels like a nice milestone though. It means we can turn some attention to weeding and otherwise maintaining the fall crops already in the ground, and start the process of fall clean-up as well. Honestly, the weeds aren't too bad right now since it has been very dry for the last month. We've been deep watering all the fields with current crops at least twice per week lately. I'm so glad we decided to put in a higher volume water service when we ran utilities up the hill. It means that we can water two fields at once (8 total 100 ft beds), which makes it possible to water the entire farm within about two days. We always water for 2 hrs to make sure the beds are getting a deep enough watering to last for a bit and encourage deeper root growth. You can really understand the efficiency of drip irrigation when it is this dry. The beds we drip irrigate don't always look 'wet' on the surface of the soil, but they retain higher moisture levels deeper into the soil than the beds that we irrigate with sprinklers. The sprinklers have their own benefits though - they help crops like lettuce cool down when the temperatures spike, they are crucial for germinating direct seeded crops, and they are much easier to set up and move around than drip tapes. We were happy to get a bit of rain on Friday night, but we are hoping for even more this week. Looks like the best chance is Friday through the weekend. We have a couple of new crops for you this week and lots of beautiful tomatoes! We are very pleased with our celery planting (see above pic) this year. It's been several years since I attempted to grow celery because it is quite a finicky crop requiring very consistent watering. After hearing about another farmers success with growing celery in a hoophouse, we decided to give it another go this year. One of the primary benefits of growing crops in a hoophouse is the ability to tightly control how much water those plants receive - which is great for tomatoes and peppers, and we are now seeing those benefits for celery too! Garden celery is a very different product from what you are used to seeing in the grocery store. It is much greener, much more flavorful, a bit more fibrous, and we leave all of the leaves on as well so you can use those to cook or garnish with. I think you could use some of this celery, the onions, and banana peppers (substitute these for the green peppers the recipe calls for) in a really delicious red beans and rice type recipe this week: https://theforkedspoon.com/red-beans-and-rice-recipe/#wprm-recipe-container-51990 The cilantro planting was as happy about the cool temps of the weekend as we were (how lovely to get a taste of fall!), and we have beautiful bunches of this for you again this week. If you find that you can't use all of yours this week, cilantro freezes well if you blend the leaves with olive oil, then freeze the resulting paste flat in a zip top bag. You can then break little aromatic chunks off whenever you need them! Or you could use a good bit of your cilantro right away in this cilantro rice. In fact, you could serve your red beans and rice over the cilantro rice!? Yum. https://www.loveandlemons.com/cilantro-lime-rice/#wprm-recipe-container-43197 Have a great week everyone!

In the share this week: 1 lb red tomatoes 1 lb yellow onions 1 bag carrots 4-5 sweet italian peppers 3 poblano peppers 1 medium garlic 1 head lettuce (summer romaine, red leaf or summer crisp) Thoughts from Farmer Anna: Well the obvious thing to talk about this week is the baking heat. Then again, that's not really very interesting and you've probably heard me drone on before about the weather enough in these newsletters :) It's sufficient to say that, yes it is super hot this week, and luckily we got our fall transplants in last week and are watering like crazy to make sure everything makes it through this week intact. So what I'll talk about instead is the new project we are getting started on this fall. We are building a lean-to greenhouse off of the southeast side of our pack shed! The pic above is the detailed construction drawings my retired civil engineer father just whipped up in an afternoon last week. We'll be able to use some leftover foundation materials from our house build in this new greenhouse, and it will benefit from having the north side being the now insulated wall of our pack shed. We are looking forward to having a really functional and perfectly sized seedling greenhouse for all of our farm plants starts and for our spring plant sale too. For the last four years or so, we've been working out of a usable temporary greenhouse that we built into the hillside. It's been a good little inexpensive greenhouse, but it's a little too small and not very centrally located so we have to run extension cords over to it to heat it in the winter and hoses over to get water to it for a good part of the year. This new greenhouse will bring us more efficiency and pleasant working conditions. An additional benefit of having the greenhouse attached to the pack shed, is that we'll be able to open the door from the greenhouse to the insulated part of the pack shed on sunny days in the winter so that we can use some of that solar gain to heat our workspace. I love when you can stack functions like that! We are breaking ground for the foundation this week and hope to have constuction completed sometime in October. It should be all ready to go for next season's seedlings! We are still picking a lot of peppers this week, so you'll get more of those deliciously sweet italian peppers along with some beautiful poblano peppers. I was thinking you could do a chile relleno type thing with both the poblanos and italian peppers plus a lot of the other items in your share this week - onions, garlic and tomato. The sweet peppers are nice for those who don't really like any spice. The link is great for learning more about poblano peppers and teaching you how to make authentic chile rellenos: https://www.innichkachef.com/post/traditional-mexican-chile-relleno-stuffed-poblano-peppers-video If you aren't using your tomato for chile rellenos, this would be a great week for some perfect BLTs! Everyone is getting a really nice head of lettuce this week. The lettuces were very happy about the mild temps last week and we are trying to harvest out these beautiful heads before they start to bolt from the intense heat this week. I wish we had more shade cloth this week! We are using it to cover recently planted lettuces along with some cilantro that is almost ready for harvest (look for that in shares next week!) Hope you all stay cool this week!

In the share this week: 1 bag carrots 1 lb green beans 1 medium garlic 1 bunch green onions Sweet italian peppers Jalapenos (pictured below) 1 head lettuce Thoughts from Farmer Anna: We enjoyed the lighter load during the break last week, and used the time to get a lot of fall things planted! Happily we finally got some more rain on Friday, so those new planting have been watered in a bit and the humans and plants are all enjoying the milder weather we're having to start this week. We are weeding the fall carrot planting and getting a few more things planted before the heat returns this weekend. It's definitely pepper time here on the farm! There are lots of sweet peppers ripening up, so we are giving double the amount of sweet italian peppers this week. I really love the flavor of these peppers - they are so much sweeter and tastier than a typical bell pepper. We are always chopping them into strips and sauteeing with onions for burrito and taco toppings. I've also been a big fan of slicing them thin and adding them to the ramen noodle soup we've been making nearly once a week around here lately. And when I needed a snack at the market on Wednesday, I just ate one whole (working around the smallish seed cavity :) They are really so versatile that you probably don't need any special ideas or recipes, but if you are feeling like putting the effort in, you could do something like this stuffed pepper recipe below: https://livingthegourmet.com/2022/11/italian-style-stuffed-peppers.html The jalapenos are also on strong enough that we have a pint (6 or 7) in your shares this week. An excellent way to preserve jalapenos is to pickle them with garlic. We'll put the pickled jalapenos on nachos, atop a cracker with cheese, or on a sandwich or taco. You could adjust this recipe slightly since it calls for 10 jalapenos (although ours are honestly fairly large, so it may end up being pretty similar). https://www.loveandlemons.com/pickled-jalapenos/ The carrots continue to be really nice, but their greens are getting week, so we'll be packing them into bags for you this week. We have another bed we haven't even gotten into yet, so expect more carrots again next week! These are another great ingredient in our ramen soups - I like to grate them so they cook super fast. And we're enjoying them raw dipped in hummus or ranch. There is no need to peel these carrots before chopping and eating. They have a very thin 'skin' and we just never find it necessary to take any goodness off of these babies. Tomatoes are off the share list this week because we are in between fruit flushes and are waiting for the next round to get going. It looks like our second planting of red tomatoes will get going later this week, so likely they'll be back on the share list next week!

In the share this week: 1 lb green beans 1 bunch carrots 1 lb mixed slicer tomatoes 1 lb mixed eggplant Sweet italian peppers 1 lb yellow onions 1 medium garlic 1 banana pepper Thoughts from Farmer Anna: We got the kids out into the field briefly this morning to help pick some green beans before it got too hot. It's can be a lot of work to get them out there on a regular day, but luckily today we had some friends come to help, and monotonous work is always lots more fun with friends to chat with! That is really one of my favorite aspects of farm work - having the time to chat while we work with our hands. Today was a little longer harvest day with carrots and green beans back on the CSA menu, but I was lucky to be working with two awesome volunteers and we had a nice time while getting it all done. I'm just a little light on farm help for the next couple of weeks, since we lost our summer college student helper to his first 'real' job and my fall helper will start when her kids go back to school. The break from CSA shares next week will help because we'll be able to devote a lot of time to the bed prep and planting that needs to be done for our fall crops. This week we'll be seeding fall beets and a first round of radishes, and transplanting lettuce, salad mix and rutabaga. Next week we'll plant napa cabbage, green cabbage and maybe kale and turnips. We seeded fall carrots 12 days ago and they have popped up nicely with all that rain last week. The weeds have also popped up there and in lots of other places on the farm, so we'll definitely be spending some time weeding this week. We are pumped about the awesome carrots we have for you this week! These are from our very nice third planting that came up so well we actually had to thin the seedlings out a bit to give them room to grow. For that reason, some of these are smaller carrots, but they are mostly very good quality and there weren't too many 'crazy' carrots with many legs, twists, etc. I think you'll be pleased and will probably be happy to eat these raw this week. I know we've been giving a lot of eggplant lately, but dang the planting has produced so well this year! If you are feeling a little overwhelmed with it at the moment, maybe give freezing it a try. It's best to cook the eggplant before freezing and the instructions in this link give you all the details: https://www.thekitchn.com/this-is-the-best-way-to-freeze-eggplant-233591 Or if you are ready to try something new, one of our volunteers this year has Greek heritage and absolutely loves eggplant. One of her favorite things to do is batter and fry it in rounds. The trick is to make sure and salt the eggplant first and allow some of the water to leach out. This improves the texture of the final product, which should be crispy on the outside and silky smooth on the inside. https://www.mygreekdish.com/recipe/crispy-fried-eggplant-recipe-greek-melitzanes-tiganites/ Green beans are back this week and we have lots of them! The plants are much healthier than our first planting that got attacked by bean beetles too early. This next planting was under row cover until flower and it made a huge difference. The beetles are now starting to proliferate on the plants, but we'll be able to get our harvest in before they totally destroy them. We have two different types of beans - a standard round bush bean called Provider, and a flatter bean called Kentucky Wonder. Both are delicious! You could cook them up with your italian sweet peppers (so, so much more delicious than grocery bell peppers), something like this recipe: https://italianfoodforever.com/2012/01/green-beans-with-peppers/ Have a great week everyone!

In the share this week: 1.5 lbs slicer tomatoes Sweet pepper mix 1 poblano pepper 1 lb eggplant 2 lbs summer squash 1 lb red long onions 1 lb sweet onions 2 lbs red beets Thoughts from Farmer Anna: Our summer cover crops are looking fabulous right now (see pic above). This field is destined to be a large greenhouse and we are doing multiple rounds of cover cropping before we put that up and start intensive vegetable growing. The area had previously been home to two of our smaller hoophouses (now moved toward the back of this pic) plus a large aisle between them, so it had gotten a lot of use over the last four years or so. Cover cropping will allow the soil to rest, rejuvenate, and build back some important minerals. We like to use a mix of crops that provide lots of different soil benefits. This summer mix has a lot of buckwheat, which is a very fast growing plant and thus great for crowding out summer annual weeds. Buckwheat is also a great scavenger of soil phosphorus, which it will release after mowing and breaking down. The mix also has some grass family plants (annual ryegrass and sorghum sudan grass), which are awesome for adding biomass and organic matter to the soil, along with crimson clover for the nitrogen fixing legume portion. The biggest benefit we can see after we cover crop an area is the difference it makes to the texture and workability of the soil. Our soil naturally contains a lot of clay, which can make it very sticky and hard to work when it's wet, and really rock hard when it's dry. Increasing the organic matter with cover crops in our soil helps break the clay apart and really improves the quality of the soil. I'm really pretty passionate about cover cropping as compared to other ways of bringing in soil fertility to the farm. Animal manures can be great if you can be confident that they are free from harmful substances, but we've had problems in the past with supposedly fully composted horse manure bringing in persistent herbicides and lots of weed seeds. Also, just the cost, logistics and fuel associated with bringing in large amounts of organic matter from off the farm is a big negative for me. Bringing in seed and growing my fertility and organic matter in place is a huge win! The downside is that it requires enough space because you are taking valuable growing space out of production for a time. For us, that trade off is worth it :) Oh my goodness the onions have been just crazy this year! I suppose we did end up with more transplants that we had orginially planned for and just planted them all. So now we have a whole lot of onions to share with you! We are giving both sweet and red long onions in the shares this week because these varieties don't store as well as the yellow and red onions. We are keeping the sweet onions in our cooler to keep them in better shape and I recommend that you keep yours in the fridge too. We are doing our best to make sure you are getting good quality onions, but I have cut into a few that had a middle layer going soft. We lowered the price of those onions and are giving a little extra too, so hopefully you'll still have plenty of good onion to work with. Last week of beets for awhile. I know we've been giving more of those than usual, but they do keep for a couple of months in your fridge so don't feel like you need to use them up right away if you have the space to store them. I'm a huge fan of making veggie fritters and this idea of making both beet and zucchini fritters looks like a delicious and colorful way to use these up. I am surprised that this recipe doesn't include any onion though and I would definitely add some in because onions make everything more delicious! https://www.lavenderandmacarons.com/beet-and-zucchini-fritters/ The eggplants are super healthy this year and producing such a beautiful crop, so those are on again this week. The sweet peppers are also starting to really come. This week is a mix of green and sweet colored peppers again and next week will probably be all colored peppers. I'm thinking you could take a number of the items in the share this week and make a veggie heavy pasta sauce. Roasting everything before combining into a sauce really concentrates the flavors! https://www.veggieinspired.com/chunky-veggie-marinara-sauce/#recipe Alrightly, have a great week everyone!

In the share this week: 1.5 lbs slicer tomatoes 1 pint cherry tomatoes 1 bunch rainbow carrots 1 lb red onions 1 green zucchini 1 lb eggplant 1 pepper mix bag Thoughts from Farmer Anna: It looks like we have some milder weather headed our way later this week! Honestly, I thought it was going to be brutally hot this afternoon, but it ended up not being too bad, with a few clouds in the sky and some nice breezes too. I'm hoping to get some cilantro seeded tomorrow if it doesn't rain in the morning before I can get to it. I always try to find a window of milder temperatures to seed cilantro so that we can have it fresh while the tomatoes are still coming on. I absolutely love fresh salsa with cilantro, but it's tough to have it at the same time as tomatoes because it's a cool weather crop. Maybe it is just meant to have later in the season when you are bringing in the last of the tomatoes, they aren't quite as nice as the early tomatoes and you use them to make a big batch of salsa before they go bad :) The tomatoes this week are really lovely and are coming on strong! We are excited to be giving you both slicer and cherry tomatoes. You should get a mix of 2-4 different types of slicers - either standard red or some of our heritage varieties (Ginfizz, Cherokee Carbon, and Strawberry Fields are our heritage varieties this year). The cherry tomatoes will either be all red (cherry bomb), all orange (citrine) or a mix of both types! I was thinking this share is just really perfect for making a pot of ratatouille since you are also getting some beautiful eggplant, zucchini, peppers and onions as well. The exact amounts of ingredients can definitely be fudged a bit with a recipe like this. I would honestly just throw in all of your veggies - even the carrots! https://cookieandkate.com/best-ratatouille-recipe/#tasty-recipes-34476-jump-target Or if you'd rather have the carrots stand alone, you could make something beautiful and delicious like this roasted rainbow carrots side dish: https://www.loveandlemons.com/roasted-rainbow-carrots/ The rainbow carrots are a lot of fun! The mix we planted includes yellow, white, purple and orange carrots. These varieties are a little more variable than orange carrots, so your bunch may include some 'fun' carrots with legs, or an interesting mix of small and large carrots, but we are doing our best to make sure there is a good mix of color in the bunches. We always weigh the bunches out too, so even if your carrots are smaller, you'll be getting more of them in a bunch. I took the picture above when we were harvesting the orange carrots last week. We use a broadfork with 12 inch tines to loosen the soil so we can pull the carrots without damaging their greens. We really love it when we lift the broadfork and see a row of beautiful carrots like those pictured :) Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 1.5 lbs tomatoes 1 lb eggplant 1 bunch carrots 1 lb yellow onions 1 head garlic 1 pepper mix bag 1 bunch basil Thoughts from Farmer Anna: The summer crops are really here this week! It always feels like a long wait for those first tomatoes and peppers, and then all of the sudden everything is ready and producing like crazy! The veggies in the share this week feel easy to use, so I don't think you'll have much trouble deciding what to do with them. If you need a little inspiration for the eggplant, check out this recipe for fried eggplant that also includes tomatoes, peppers and garlic. The exact amounts called for in the recipe aren't totally binding and I think you could use all of the peppers in your pepper mix (green bell, banana, poblano and jalapeno - depending on how spicy you like things). https://www.themediterraneandish.com/fried-eggplant-recipe-with-green-peppers-tomato/ We just finished processing our cured garlic and it looks very nice so we are happy to be sharing that with you this week. The flavor of farm or homegrown garlic is way different than what you can get in the store, which is typically just a single variety. The varieties we have this year include two hardnecks (music and chesnook red) and one softneck variety, the name of which I'm not sure because it was a replacement for another type of hardneck garlic that I had ordered :) Now that the garlic is out of our little drying greenhouse, we are busily getting the main season storage onion crop harvested and laid out for drying. We made good progress yesterday and I have a bit more to get in today before the possible rain this afternoon. Speaking of rain, we finally got a good drenching rain last week and the farm is so thankful! We absolutely needed that recharge so the plants could continue growing. We have definitely seen the impacts of low rain totals over the last month and you'll notice that some of the carrots in your share this week are rather small. The quality of the salad mix lettuce has also been impacted, but we plant enough of it that it hasn't been too much of an issue in limited our harvest capacity yet. It looks like we should be getting a bit more rain this week, so hopefully we'll be getting into a new weather pattern with more frequent rains. Hope you all have a great week!

In the share this week: 2 fennel bulbs 1 bunch beets Summer squash mix 1 cucumber 1 bunch red long onions 1 lb yellow onions 1 bunch kale Thoughts from Farmer Anna: We finally got some rain on the farm yesterday evening! It was a hot, dry week and we were worried the rain wouldn't materialize on Sunday. It wasn't much, but it definitely helped soften the soil so that we'll be able to do some of the bed prep we weren't able to get to last week. We'll be seeding two beds of green beans, two beds of carrots and eight beds to a summer cover crop mix. Most of that will be happening tomorrow before the rain we are slated to get on Wednesday, but some of the cover crops beds will wait until later in the week. While it feels hard to give up vegetable crop growing space in the middle of the season we have learned that it is well worth the time and space. Cover crops do a fabulous job of increasing soil organic matter and boosting nutrient levels for the cash crops that follow them. Our summer mix includes at least one grain (sorghum sudan grass), and two legumes (cowpeas and sunhemp). We had to order a more complex mix this year since we couldn't find these seeds in smaller quantities, so we may also have some millet and sunflowers in the mix as well! While our first planting of carrots did not germinate well, we are starting to harvest the first of those roots. Our second planting is better and hopefully those will be sized up to start harvesting next week or the week after. Our third planting of carrots is totally awesome and we just finished up handweeding that crop last week (check out pick below). So while the carrots are a little late to come on this year, we should have some nice ones coming up for you later in the season! We have lots of onions for you in the share this week. Hopefully you are something like us in that you can never have too many onions :) We are pulling some beautiful fresh red long italian onions and have a good amount of cured yellow onions too, so both of those will be in your share. The italian onions can be used in any recipe that calls for onions and they also substitute for shallot fairly well. I think their shape makes dicing easier or cutting into thin rounds as well. They would be excellent in this beet and fennel salad recipe below: https://sweetpotatosoul.com/beet-fennel-salad/ Since fennel is in the share this week and we have so many beautiful beets, we had to give these two vegetables together. Their flavors really do pair quite well together along with a vinegary dressing. This simple recipe really highlights the fresh flavors and is fairly easy to put together. It would make amazing leftovers as the flavors will meld over time too! The zucchini and squash are producing well this week - they don't mind the heat as long as we are getting them water. I love the idea of making a fresh summery pasta with the squash and kale in your share this week. Make sure to use some of your onions instead of the shallot they call for in this recipe: https://hereinthemidst.com/2021/09/10/zucchini-and-kale-lemon-pepper-pasta/ The kale this spring has been really quite amazing. Typically we wouldn't still be harvesting enough of it for shares, but it still looks great. It's such a versatile vegetable and we hope you have found ways you like to eat it. If not, you could try making kale chips or throwing it into a soup or salad. In fact it would go pretty well chopped small in with the beet and fennel salad, for added color and texture. Have a great week everyone!

In the share this week: 1 bunches broccoli 1 head cabbage 2 lbs summer squash 1 cucumber 1 bunch salad turnips 1 bunch sweet onions 1 bunch dill Thoughts from Farmer Anna: Heat and kittens! That's what is on my mind this week. We've actually been very lucky so far this season, with some very mild temperatures in May and June. But it looks to be crazy hot this week, peaking toward the end of the week and looking a little better to start the next week. It's going to be tough to stay on top of the watering since we'd already been experiencing a bit of a dry spell before the heat wave. Fingers crossed for some pop-up thunderstorms during the week. This weather means that we'll be harvesting out of many of our late spring crops fairly quickly. Sometimes we are lucky to spread the broccoli harvest over three weeks, but with this heat we'll probably be picking everything left this week. That means everyone gets double the amount of broccoli this week, which is nice because it will be enough to actually cook something broccoli-forward. Or maybe you'll decide not to cook and have dips for dinner with fresh broccoli, cucumber, and salad turnips paired with hummus and ranch (with fresh dill!). Yum- I think we may have to do this! So now you are wondering about the kittens? There has been a sweet female cat hanging around the farm for the last few months (see above pic with the kale and tomatoes. She had been lounging under the shade of the kale just before and popped up when I tried to take a pic :). She's very friendly and is a bit of a community cat. Well, she had a litter of kittens at our neighbors house a few weeks ago and just this past weekend she decided to bring those five kittens to our house. They are maybe near 4 weeks old and pretty darn adorable. We are helping to care for them and make sure the kittens are socialized so they have a chance of being adopted or just being an army of awesome farm cats helping keep the voles under control :) I'm a little worried about how they'll handle the heat this week, but they have a nice shady spot of the east side of our house under the deck. We already have an appointment with a local org to get mama cat spayed (so we don't end up with an actual army of cats on the farm), so I'm feeling good about that. She's a sweet girl and such a good mouser! The veggies in the share this week are solid! In addition to the broccoli, everyone will be getting the first summer squash of the season - including zucchini (green or yellow) and yellow crookneck squash. One last spring planting of the salad turnips is on this week as well, and they have beautiful roots and greens! We love to make veggie fritters at our house and I found this recipe with turnips and zucchini and using a waffle maker instead of frying them. All of those crispy caramelized edges! Fritters are always more delicious that is seems like they have any right to be :) https://hereinthemidst.com/2023/08/25/turnip-zucchini-hashbrown-waffles/ The cucumbers are just coming on this week so there is only one in your share. If you don't decide to eat them with your 'dips for dinner' menu plan maybe you could try this creamy cucumber salad that one of our farm team members, Carley, shared with me: https://www.primalkitchen.com/blogs/recipes/creamy-cucumber-salad?tw_source=google&tw_adid=&tw_campaign=17750154394&utm_source=google&utm_medium=ads&utm_campaign=&utm_id=go_cmp-17750154394_adg-_ad-__dev-c_ext-_prd-_sig-Cj0KCQjwvb-zBhCmARIsAAfUI2vKyFS9MPVSDHn6sheDoLuJsfv6Pc63BgtKAXkIAWnN0qglfG3CRp0aAjM-EALw_wcB&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwvb-zBhCmARIsAAfUI2vKyFS9MPVSDHn6sheDoLuJsfv6Pc63BgtKAXkIAWnN0qglfG3CRp0aAjM-EALw_wcB Hope you all stay cool this week! We are going to try to get work done in the AM and PM and take mid-day breaks as much as possible. Cross your fingers for just a bit of rain to help us out!