In this Week's Box

When you get this box home, everything goes in plastic bags in the refrigerator except the tomatoes. To get you the best possible tomatoes, we harvest them a few days short of dead ripe; even over short distances, dead ripe tomatoes don’t travel well, and you simply can’t hold a fully ripe tomato for more than a day or two. I like to put my tomatoes out on the windowsill to ripen. If I want to hold them for later in the week, I find a cooler, darker spot for them. In direct sunlight, they will ripen very quickly.

Romaine Lettuce – Now that summer’s heat has set in in earnest, this will be the last romaine lettuce harvest of the season. We’ll start planting the fall crop soon.

Lettuce Mix – On the other hand, we can keep the lettuce mix producing nicely all summer long, and should have this on a regular basis. The harvest crew got a little over-enthusiastic this week, so we’ve got a big bag for your box; but with the heat, it’s hard to go wrong with salads.

Carrots with their Tops – We decided to keep the tops on the carrots this week. I use them to make vegetable stock or as an addition to chicken stock, and in Western Europe, fancy ladies used to use the carrot tops to decorate their hair the place of feathers.

Green Garlic

Yellow Zucchini – We grow yellow zucchini because they are so much easier to harvest, and their flavor is just as fine as the flavor of the green ones.

Sungold Cherry Tomatoes – The Sungolds are coming on strong, with vines already reaching over nine feet tall in the greenhouses. Zane put a lot of work this week into unwinding the tomato twine to lower the plants, leaving the top six feet upright and laying the bottoms of the vines down closer to the ground.

Red Tomatoes or Cucumbers

Broccoli – With the first broccoli harvest of the season, I can’t say that I’m too happy with the overall quality. We’ve got some disease issues causing “brown bead” in the heat and humidity, which reduces the storage life of the broccoli. It is still very usable, and we have worked hard to get it good and cold so that it will last as long as possible.

Golden Swiss Chard - Swiss Chard is also known as “perpetual spinach”, and although I think it has a lot more merit on its own than as a spinach substitute, they are readily interchangeable in recipes calling for cooked greens. Our yellow-stemmed variety is just a little more fun than the white kind.

Fennel