Dear Farm Friends,
There’s not much to say but “sorry” for the fact that our once weekly email newsletter hasn’t gone out for well over a month. It’s been a doozy of a season, and sometimes it feels like we’ve been barely hanging on. Most Fridays we’ve been collapsing to sleep far too late, often with a half-written newsletter still floating in our heads.
It’s a doozy in many good and delicious ways, too, though. We’ve been feeling all your love at market, with record amounts of food loaded in that little market trailer, and a line of eaters we can barely keep up with even with extra help hired for market. With the new packshed not yet finished, we are still quite limited on cooler space, so keeping the produce flowing out, off the farm is so important. Thanks for all of your patience and for continuing to come on out, supporting us, the market, the farmstore, and our fellow farmers.
As we slide into September, we have a lot of good stuff, and we actually need your help making room for all the good stuff yet to come in, and making sure the sweet and perishable bits of summer don’t get lost or wasted! Read on for details and the link to sign up for picking up some bulk deals at the hosted farmstore time this week (and if you aren’t ready this week, we’ll be preparing for a few more rounds of this).
This is always such a tricky point in the year for a four-season farm like us. We could spend all reasonable hours of the day just harvesting the summer and fall bounty, but….we also have winter plantings to prepare (more on this soon, but yes, winter memberships and greens for the winter farmstore are in the plans), beds to mow and seed with soil-building cover crops to prepare for next year, and of course that packshed build to finish. August was mostly about keeping our heads above water, and this first week of September, hot and smoky, feels like August has not quite stopped yet.
But what does it mean for you? Salsa kits, bulk deals, big piles of melons! We’ll be pulling out the market trailer this week for the Tuesday hosted farmstore hours, spreading out the shocking wealth of melons, the beautiful garlic braids that Sabrina wove, and are taking reservations for salsa canning kits, bulk bags of beets, and will have plenty of good stuff and bulk deals on things like tomatoes and cabbage, with no reservation required.
About those melons…Noah is still harvesting, as the last light fades and I type this up. We have done too many headlamp-harvests in that melon patch, for sure. We are swimming in melons—we aren’t sure exactly what we did, though we planted 30% more space to melons this year, and they went in a block that got a cover crop last summer and some nice compost this spring and really happy transplants from our new and improved greenhouse…..but still, we are a little shocked. We have totes of melons in the shop, in the farmstore, in the unfinished new packshed. So many melons it’s, well, it’s a bit of a problem. We need to gear up to finish the build on that building so it can house another walk-in cooler, and storage space for onions and winter squash, but if we aren’t careful we are going to fill it up with produce before it is done. And melons do not play well stored with ethylene-sensitive vegetables in the walk-in cooler, so they really need to get off the farm fast, before they go bad. We have been too busy harvesting to try it out yet, but a quick search revealed several recipes for melon jam, we hope some of you give it a shot. We also like to cut them up into cubes, freeze them, and use them as ice cubes in sparkling water in winter for a hint of summer treat.
You can help us by coming out this Tuesday and loading up on melons, produce in general, and if you are ready for canning, we are offering our red and green salsa kits by reservation. Just fill out the form here and we’ll have one ready for you to pick up.
The red salsa kit makes about 6 pints and includes: 5 lbs tomatoes, 1lb of sweet peppers, 6-8 onions, 1 head of garlic, 10-12 hot peppers, and one bundle of cilantro (optional). This is based on a Ball jar canning recipe.
The green salsa kit makes about 6 pints of salsa verde and includes: 8 lbs of tomatillos, 4 onions, 4 jalapeño or poblano peppers, 1 head of garlic, and a bundle of cilantro (optional). We have that recipe from an old blog post, here.
We also have big bags of beets for pickling (or however you like to preserve them), 10 lbs for $18, 30 lbs for $35, and bulk onions, tomato flats, and cabbage available. And to help move those melons, we are offering a one-day special on Tuesday, buy three melons, get the fourth (of equal or lesser value) free!
Have you tried Shishito peppers yet? A delicious little Asian frying pepper, mostly mild with a green savory flavor, but just to keep it interesting, one in about every hundred peppers is a little bit spicy. Our favorite way to prepare them is to heat oil in a heavy skillet, toss the peppers in and stir them a few times to blister the skins. When they have softened a bit and turned a brighter green, just sprinkle them with salt, grab the stem and eat them whole. It’s our favorite appetizer this time of year, what we eat while we make the dinner plan.
It’s also a fun time to take a walk around the farm and peek at what is happening….the chickens just moved to new pasture (a bit of a hike out, but they are happy), the flower patches are bursting as we let some beds go to the bees and the birds when they passed their ideal cutting stage, so it’s literally buzzing around here.
Chickens in some lush green pasture, thanks largely to Tyler taking on the job of pasture irrigation with the “big gun” sprinkler.
Hope to see you soon,
Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm
The planting continues….we have just two more rounds of our weekly greens seeding in the field, then it’s all into tunnels for winter!