It's not fall yet. Tomatoes and potatoes.

Greetings shareholders,

 

This week, we have tomatoes, green beans, a few puny peppers, hot peppers, parsley and basil, eggplant, Russet potatoes, onions, garlic, and a little kale.  Maybe cucumbers if we can find enough.  Seems like the okra might be on vacation right now, waiting for another good rain. 

 

Russet potatoes are the brown ones we usually think of as bakers.  They are smaller than the ones from the store, but WAAAAAY better tasting.  There are no pesticides on them, so you can eat the skins.  I just washed them off and baked for a short time.  They are like eating marshmallows!   We'll only have them for one week, so enjoy.

 

The tomato plants are unbelievably healthy right now, very leafy with little disease and lots of green fruit.  There are a least 100 late-planted plants that we've not picked anything from yet that I'm eager to harvest.  We're getting lots of tomatoes, and they've been tasting very good, but a little rain and a few more warm days would help a lot more very handsome ones mature.  I think these might be the nicest tomatoes I've grown in several years.

 

Peppers, on the other hand, are still a mess.  The fruits are small, sunburned, and thin walled and don't seem to be getting any better.  We'll give you as many as we can get, but it's sure not what I had planned.  I thought I'd be burying you in ripe peppers by now.  Some of the chili peppers are bearing more, so we'll give you a few more this week.  The eggplant plants seem to be starting to bear fruit, also, so I think we can find enough to give one to everybody.  Once again, we should be up to our eyeballs in eggplant right now.  Usually people are mad at me by this time of year because there are so many eggplant. 

 

The kale is happy with the cooler temperatures.  The leaves are smaller than they are in the spring, but nice.  We'll pick some this week.  Not sure we can give you armloads of it, but there will be some.  Collards are looking better, too.  We'll start picking them again in the next couple of weeks.

 

We could use another inch of rain, but my buddy Schnackenberg isn't too optimistic.  I've started irrigating again to help us have some leafy greens in October.  But nothing I can do is as good as a real rain.  That, and some nice warm days, would really help both the fall greens and the last plantings of squash, beans, cilantro, and cucumbers.  There's still hope of warmth after we get through this week.  It's not fall yet!

 

We had about 20 wonderful Cornell volunteers on Saturday morning who helped with potato digging.  In less than two hours, they picked up more than a ton of spuds.  THANKS.  Only about one more ton to get before the end of the season.  

 

See you this week,

Laura