Jack’s Reveal Week #6 7-24-24

Hello and welcome to Featherstone Farms summer CSA program week number 6. It's the end of July, we're moving from vegetative crops into fruiting crops. We have a lot of wonderful things on the near horizon, a lot of wonderful things in the box this week. Let's take a look at what we're packing this week.

Second week of sweet corn, very very nice crop, SH2 super sweet varieties. The early corns do tend to have more worms than later plantings. So if you had a worm in corn, our apologies, we're doing our best to sort it out. But certainly the 99% of the rest of that year is good eating. We have corn in the box this week, plenty of it.

I made a wonderful slaw just two days ago with one of these pointed spring cabbages. It's been cool enough through the months of June, first half of July. Below average temperatures, which means sweeter and really crunchy cabbage for slaw. So I strongly recommend this. Thin, thin slice, it can take a little extra time to make those really thin slices. Really gives you a crunchy slaw with the spring cabbage. It's a really nice one.

We have gold beets this week. These are a fine one, residual from last year, mixed beets from previous years. Gold beets are the richest, most wonderful flavor. Pickled beets are something you can really do this time of year. You do have to peel these back, however. These are storage beets, not fresh spring beets.

We have, speaking of pickles, cucumbers. Visited my son Emmett last weekend, and he's a CSA member. Has run the program, some of you may remember. Emmett had made pickles with cucumbers from Featherstone Farm and the tops of fennel from last week's box. And just marvelous three-day refrigerator pickles. If you're getting too many cucumbers, or for that matter, Hakurei turnips, zucchini, many things, beets can be pickled and produce really wonderful, crunchy, refreshing pickles in a short period of time, many recipes online.

Hakurei turnips, as I just mentioned. We have had to sacrifice the tops. We've had trouble with tops recently, folks. This is part of the issue with all the rainfall, residual rain. Our apologies for a certain amount of breakdown in radish tops, turnip tops last week, but the roots are still really good and make, as I say, really fresh dipping scoops or pickles, things like this, for spring or summer salads.

Yellow onions, we brought in and topped bagged onions. These are cooking onions, but again, with the cooler weather, they have been sweeter. They have not been real pungent, powerful onions so far this summer.

Another week of really wonderful beans. Folks, green beans are something that are not common in CSA programs. They take forever to pick, and this year we have really doubled down on them. They're a very important, popular item for members like yourselves, so we are really spending time focusing on picking beans at the right time, small, tender beans, and we have a lot of them, a real success for our CSA program. Hope you enjoy them.

We're getting into peppers for the first time now. I mentioned fruiting crops, things that have been transplanted for a long time, big plants that set flowers and then fruits. The first peppers of the year are an early variety. They're a three-lobe variety called Ace. You can see this has just got three lobes here. It's a more cylindrical, lighter-weight fruit. It's got a decent head weight to it and thick wall of that pepper, but not like the heavier four-lobe fruits that are coming later in the season. If they seem a little bit light, a little more work to get the same amount cut up, a diced pepper, wait for a couple of weeks. We get heavier coming, but these are early July peppers, nice size, green bells.

Eggplants are another summer fruit coming on strong now, but we have had production issues, I'm afraid, with rainy weather. Don't have enough eggplants for every share. Our apologies. We're doing our very best to create full boxes with the fruits, the crops that we have on hand, but we are going to have to short some eggplants this week. Again, this is farming in the upper Midwest. We're doing what we can, and we will try to make up for a shortage of eggplant in future boxes. A lot of eggplant in the production line coming for you.

This is an interesting one here. For those of you that are not part of our spring CSA program may not know about this red Russian kale. This is a completely different kale than what you're used to getting from us or that you can typically buy in the grocery store. It is a much lighter, more tender leaf. You can see the stems are much thinner. These are grown undercover, which is why they're slender and really lightweight to keep the flea beetles off of them. This is one of my absolute favorite eating crops, folks. But don't treat it like green kale, which is much hardier, much denser. This cooks much less time or makes a wonderful salad with a lighter, crunchier flavor than the heavier summer green kales. So, red Russian kale. Then a couple of wonderful herbs coming back into the mix, despite the moisture.

These are also really difficult to produce when it's raining cats and dogs all the darn time. Dill and cilantro. We're putting them into boxes this week without plastic bags. We've got a lot of feedback from members that see all the plastic. We do use on occasion to protect certain crops from breakdown. We don't want to see airflow making the cilantro, the dill, or for that matter, the Russian kale. These are tender crops here. We don't want them to wilt in the box, but we're not going to be putting them in plastic this week. If you get any of these sorts of things in your box and it doesn't seem really vital, crunchy, fresh, just take a knife and cut an inch off the bottom, set a bunch of parsley like that in a cup for about one hour, and it'll bring it right back to life. Same thing with the dill, same thing with the red Russian kale.

We do have one other thing on the line this week from our place, spinach. Again, a difficult, very difficult crop to grow in consistent chronic rainfall. A lot of yellowing, spoiling, and green spinach, and therefore shorting boxes. We don't have quite enough. We know it's a popular deal. Sorry about it, folks. We're doing our best. And the good news, sun coming out more and more, better normal summer weather, and so the next few boxes look really clear sailing. We'll see you then.