In the Share - Week 22

the pepper harvest

SWEET POTATOES (F/P) A good harvest with some real jumbos. Don’t refrigerate your sweets! They don’t like to get below 50 degrees.
SWEET PEPPERS (F/P) The frost threatened so we picked them all. Full shares get 2 lbs, partials 1.5 lbs. Read Tom’s post for some simple ideas for preserving and enjoying them.
GARLIC (F/P) Softneck variety, keeps well.
CHINESE CABBAGE, BOK CHOI OR TAT SOI (F)
ARUGULA, THYME OR GARLIC CHIVES (F/P)
HAKUREI TURNIPS (P)

BROCCOLI OR CAULIFLOWER (F) Just enough for the full shares this week, partial shares are next in line. We are scrambling a bit as the second planting stalled after the deluge 2 weeks ago.
EGGPLANT, GREEN TOMATOES OR HOT PEPPERS (F) Harvested before the frost and the last of the season.

ALSO THIS WEEK: Parker Farms delivery

NEXT WEEK: More broccoli and cauliflower. Kohlrabi, butternut squash and leeks. Cilantro and dill. Kale, collards and Swiss Chard return.

Saturday morning we awoke to a frost advisory for our area for that night. After the regular CSA harvest morning, the farm crew jumped to the task of harvesting anything that might be damaged. The last of the sweet potatoes came out well. We think all the heat and humidity of this summer led to some extra large sweets. We have several football-sized ones to feed us through the winter. Most of the crop was Beauregard, a standard commercial type with sweet orange flesh. We also planted a short stretch of O'Henry, a white variety that grew very uniformly. Hardly any footballs, but few small ones either. We mashed up some for dinner the other night and they were tender and oh so creamy.

one of many crates of Beauregards now safely stored in the greenhouse

Sweet peppers were the other big harvest on Saturday. We ended up with over 200 lbs. of these last jewels of summer. In the last hours of the day we covered the young lettuces with row cover, picked the remaining eggplant, hot peppers and green tomatoes. The sun set and we rested easy knowing that we had done what we needed to do.

The next morning we awoke to frost on the ground. It was a light and patchy frost. Only the most sensitive plants were hit and only here and there. A bit of frost on the tops of the basil plants and on the tips of the okra. The pepper plants look fine. If the warm weather holds for a few weeks we may even get another harvest.