Week Nine; July 30, 2008

At last, tomatoes!!! We really wanted to get you tomatoes, so we picked them a little under-ripe. Just let them sit on your countertop, and they’ll ripen. Don’t refrigerate. Bleck! They’ll just get mushy.

We are hoping this is just the beginning of a generous tomato crop, but all that rain we’ve had wasn’t such a good thing for tomatoes. For one thing, bees don’t care for rain. So they have not been busy cross pollinating—bopping from blossom to blossom—so that the plants are more prolific. (We’re noticing this too with our summer squash; production is now down.) Also, all this rain encourages blight—“the scourge of tomato growers in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic states and Midwest,” notes our seed supplier. And no matter how much we dust the plants with copper (an organic method for discouraging blight), with so much moisture, there’s little that can be done. We are seeing blight on the leaves of our tomato plants but, so far, not the tomatoes themselves. We’re just trying to keep our fingers crossed, since we planted our largest tomato crop ever—about 1,500 plants among which are 15 different varieties.

The variety you have this week is called New Girl. It’s an early variety that, as far as I can tell, is relatively all-purpose. Use it sliced, in salads or in a quick sauce.


Here’s what was in this week’s share:
3 tomatoes
3 green peppers
2 big fresh onions—1 red, 1 Walla Walla
fresh garlic
½ pound salad mix
3 cucumbers
1 bunch of basil
2 large eggplants
1 pound of green beans
1 head of green cabbage