Next week is the final week of summer with the equinox coming late this year and falling on Saturday the 23rd. The shares next week will be slightly different on Monday and Thursday, as they have been recently. Monday’s share should have chard, beets, lettuce, tomato, sweet pepper, shallot and parsley. Thursday got beets yesterday so probably no more of those, and they also got chard so we’ll probably have kale in the shares. The shallots will probably be French Grey Shallots, a very different shallot than what we’ve grown in the past. French Grey Shallots are a true shallot, and a different species than the shallots we’ve been growing for years, which are more closely related to onions. French Grey are small, with a hard, tight wrapper and more intense flavor. In some ways I think of them more like garlic than an onion. To get the wrapper off I use a sharp knife to cut off the root end callous and then I cut them in half lengthwise. The the wrapper comes off almost like a shell. Unlike most of the other onions and shallots we grow French Grey shallots to not keep well into the late fall so they should be used within the next month or two.
Yesterday’s big field projects, other than the ongoing weeding, were harvesting and curing the winter squash and popcorn. The popcorn is now all hanging in the hoop house to finish curing and we’ll give it out later in the year. Winter squash will probably go out in the early fall shares as we don’t have a good place to store it on the farm – and really we’re too small a farm to grow very much of it.
We still have 5 fall shares available for the B schedule which has six pick-ups starting in October and going every other week into December so sign up soon if you don’t have one yet. If you’ve already signed up for a fall share, thank you! And, you should be getting an email with all the details for the first pick-up in the next week or two, depending on which schedule you picked.
Cully Neighborhood Farm 