Week 14: September 2nd

In This Week’s Beet Box:

New Produce: Red Storage Onions! Chehalis Apples!
Halfway!
Sweet Peppers by the Bag!
Calapooia Garlic by the Bag or the Braid!

In your share this week:

Red Storage Onions
Cylindra Beets
Carrots
Chehalis Apples
Sweet Corn
Sweet Peppers
Strawberries
Zucchini
Tomatoes – Red & Heirloom

On Rotation:

This means that some pickup sites will receive it this week, others next week – or in a future week.

Cucumbers
Cherry Tomatoes
Cauliflower

NEW PRODUCE OF THE WEEK

Red Storage Onions: The big red onions this week are a variety called Red Emperor, and they are a medium-term storage onion. They are fully cured, so no need to refrigerate. They’re supposed to keep for up to a couple of months under ideal conditions (cool & dry).

These onions have been a delight to grow, harvest and clean. We’ve never had such beautiful, huge, red onions in all our years of farming. The sunny spring certainly helped, but it may also be the variety itself. We usually grow a red onion called Cabernet, but it was sold out this year, forcing us to resort to Red Emperor. It was a bit of gamble since we’d never trialed it before, but we’ve had happy results so far. We’ll see how well they keep into the fall, but for now we’re enjoying the satisfaction of our heaviest onion harvest to date.

Chehalis Apples: Just in time for back to school! Another product of our beautiful spring, much of the orchard is laden with apples this year. The pollination was so thorough on some trees that we’ve had to thin a lot of fruit and still there are branches breaking under all the weight.

Chehalis is a relatively early apple, and it’s earlier than ever this year. It’s thin-skinned, sweet, crispy, and incredibly juicy – intended for fresh eating and baking. They’re more delicate than some apples so try not to bang them around to avoid bruising. If you don’t eat them right away, keep them in the fridge to prevent them from getting mushy.

Halfway!

This week marks the halfway point in the CSA season: 14 weeks down, 14 to go. If this week's dense share is any indication of the direction we're headed, you can rest assured that heavy will be the name of the Harvest Basket game this fall. All that sturdy food in your tote (note the sheer absence of light, leafy stuff this week!) is the sum total of so many summer hours of sunlight, heat and water, all condensed into a rainbow of fruit and vegetables for you. The farm takes on a certain gravity, a weightedness, at this time of year that is palpable: so many tons of food lurking underground (potatoes, beets, carrots, parsnips, turnips, radishes, celeriac, onions!) and squatting above ground (squash, cabbages, giant kohlrabi, ripe corn, gone-to-seed sunflowers). I never worry about scarcity at this time of year; only whether the week's harvest will fit into a Rubbermaid!

Sweet Peppers by the Bag!

The sweet peppers are on! Order now to get ‘em in bulk for fresh eating or preserving. You can choose from either:

Roasters: 5 pounds of sweet red roasters
Jellybean Mix: 5 pounds of mixed bells and roasters - red, orange, yellow, purple (no green)

The cost is $20/bag. Orders will be fulfilled on a rolling basis in the order received (pepper season usually goes into October). To order, please email us:

Your name
Your pickup location
Best daytime phone number to reach you
The type and quantity of peppers you would like (in 5 pound increments).

Peppers preserve wonderfully.

Frozen: just dice them up raw and toss them into a freezer bag.

Roasted: blacken the outer skin over an open flame, toss them into in a lidded pot to steam, peel the skin off once they’ve cooled, lay the roasted peppers on cookie sheets to freeze individually, then transfer to a freezer bag.

Either way, they are a great addition to wintertime meals – pasta sauces, stir fries, soups, lasagna, and more!

Garlic by the Bag or the Braid!

For some reason, we’re unable to grow garlic at the farm. Each time we’ve planted it, we lose the entire crop to white rot, rust, flooding, or other diseases. After enough disappointments we’ve stopped trying altogether.

Our long-time family friends have a small organic farm called Calapooia Crossing. They are located on the Calapooia River in the foothills of the Cascades and they excel at growing garlic. Last year they brought us part of their harvest and we sold it at the farmstand, to wide acclaim. They just delivered this year’s crop to us, so we have a couple hundred pounds of beautiful garlic for the offering. It’s available at the farmstand, but for those of you who can’t make the trip, we’re happy to deliver bulk bags to your pickup site.

Here's the scoop if you want to order:

Bulk garlic is available in 3 pound bags, $25 per bag. (There are about 5 large heads of garlic per pound, so a bulk bag contains approximately 15+ heads of garlic. It’s a hardneck variety, meaning the head has a central core with a ring of large, easy-to-peel cloves around the core.)
Garlic braids are also available, $12 apiece. Braids contain approximately 7 heads of softneck garlic called Italian Late. It’s the best keeper and makes a beautiful gift.

If you’d like to order, please email us: