*Hooray for the start of tomato season! photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have slicing cucumbers, carrots, summer squash, zucchini, purple kohlrabi, caraflex cabbage, green cabbage, fennel, new red and yellow potatoes, broccoli, French filet green beans, garlic, garlic scapes, scallions, baby bok choi, green curly kale, lacinato kale, spinach, baby lettuce, basil, parsley, sage, oregano, thyme, cherry tomatoes, and slicing tomatoes.

Tomatoes! We estimate that we will have plenty of tomatoes this week, but it’s always helpful to include preffered substitutions in your delivery order form in case we are wrong for the anticpiated first week of true tomato bounty, especially if you order over 4 or 5 items worth of tomatoes this week.

Do you love guacamole and want a super fun recipe for summer squash or zucchini? If so, check out this week’s recipe at the bottom of the newsletter: The other evening, we had a taco dinner with our nephew, and I asked him what his favorite part of a taco bar was, he said guacamole…. and I didn’t have any avocados in the house… So I went to google-land and spliced together a few ideas from various concepts of guacamole alternatives on the internet, and the recipe below is what emerged. We all loved it, have made it again since then, and affectionately called it “fake-a-mole.” We made it without the cheese that is mentioned in the recipe, but I imagine it just makes it even creamier if you use cheese.

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Farm News from Ryan

One of the exciting projects from this week was harvesting most of the garlic. I estimated that we harvested about 7640 bulbs of garlic so far, with just under 2,000 bulbs remaining of a separate variety that matures slightly later. One minor benefit of the excessive rain that we received over the past two weeks is that the garlic pulled very easily from the moist soil. Right now, most of the garlic is curing under the cover of our propagation greenhouse. Once it’s dry, we’ll cut the tops off and store it in a cool dry place. It should be available well into the winter share for CSA folks to enjoy. We’re also excited to have a great crop of very large garlic bulbs that will be available for anyone who wants to plant their own garlic this fall. It’s a fun crop to grow in a garden: with the proper space and fertility, they usually grow pretty easily and experience the same critter pressure as most crops.

Another highlight of this week was Thursday morning, when the whole crew met early for work to walk through most of the fields on the farm to take stock of the fields this time of the season. As we walked through all of the fields, we talked about how rewarding it felt to see how well the farm is cared for this summer. It’s especially exciting to see how well plants are growing in fields that, for the first time, are grown using no-till practices. We’re seeing excellent growth of those fall crops, excellent weed control, and really good soil coverage from the previous cover-crop residue. It was a big jump for the farm to go from a single 1/10 acre field grown this way last year, to almost a full acre of no-till production on cover crop residue, and it’s especially rewarding to see these crops look so good when we grow them using these techniques that help improve the long-term quality of the farm’s soil and improved capacity to sequester carbon.