Here’s my best guess for next week: more tomatoes, fewer summer squash and cucumbers, maybe a sweet pepper or two, possibly some onions and potatoes, and a head of lettuce too, I hope. Thursday all got a sweet pepper in their share this week and a few notes on our sweet peppers are in order here. If you’re ever wondering, we don’t put hot peppers in the shares but they are available in the you-pick area at the farm. We also don’t grow bell peppers so most of our pepper varieties are pointy, easily confused with hot peppers but not hot at all. Typically our earliest pepper is Jimmy Nardello and sadly this year I was unable to get seed for that variety – but – we have a similar, slightly later variety called Gernika. These are indeed from the Basque region and I read that they are typically harvested green, fried whole and sprinkled with salt. We’ve been waiting for some color and they do get very sweet when red, but we’ll probably give out some green ones this week. Our one non-pointy pepper is Liebesapfel, a squat, thick-walled pimento. We’ll often give these out before they’ve fully turned red, but if you leave them on your counter for a few days they should turn red (I’m told their name means “candy apple” in German) and get a bit sweeter. Leaving peppers that aren’t quite fully colored yet works with all of our peppers, and does make them sweeter – and the same goes for our tomatoes.
The photo above are of the last three trays of seedlings for planting in our greenhouse – escarole and mustards. They’ll go in the ground in the next week or two and then we’ll have a few more direct seedings before the planting season will be completely finished for us. Yesterday we planted out the first round of escarole, as well as our final round of lettuce. We had a bit of a failure of a large lettuce planting during that last heat wave so we plugged in some extra plants this week and we’ll also direct seed some extra greens as insurance. This cooler weather should be more conducive for some of the greens, but it would be great to get just a little more (moderate) heat and sun in the next month to really set us up well for the fall!
Cully Neighborhood Farm 