Harvest Notes Week 12

Paste Tomatoes The narrow, oblong shaped tomatoes are often referred to as paste tomatoes or sauce tomatoes. They aren’t as juicy as slicing tomatoes and thus are more often used to make sauce since you don’t have to boil them down as long to get that concentrated tomato flavor. They are also often used for pico de gallo to get a firmer tester with less juice. That said, I make sauce out of slicing tomatoes all the time and salsa too and it’s all delicious! We grow two varieties of paste tomatoes, San Marzanos (a classic Italian type) and Speckled Roman (a gorgeous and delicious heirloom with golden stripes).

Slicing Tomatoes These are the round tomatoes in your share and are classically thought of as being suited for salads, sandwiches and, if you’re my seven year old, simply being sliced up and salted for raw consumption. Remember that there is a range of ripeness represented in your tomatoes to last you the week so you can eat the ripest first and keep the less ripe ones on your counter top for a few days.

Watermelon !!! Melon season is feels like an exciting victory every year. The raccoons love these as much as we do, gnawing a hole in the rind of their favorites and then carving out the inside with their paws, so we’re lucky to have any left for us to harvest. The variety is called Sugar Baby and we think they are delicious. We are pretty good at determining which watermelons are ripe before harvesting but it’s always a bit of a mystery since we can’t see inside until you slice them open. If you ever get an underripe melon, please let us know! 

Parsley This might be a good week for tabouli or other fresh tomato-y salads with parsley. Garlic These heads are now fully cured and can be stored out of the fridge.

Green Peppers and Purple Peppers Both of these types of peppers are savory rather than sweet like red or yellow peppers.

Jalapeño These small green peppers are hot.

Carrots These yummy snacking veggies are back after a mid-summer hiatus!

Sweet Onion These white onions are like walla wallas. They are quite yummy raw or caramelized. They are fresh, not cured, so they are best stored in the fridge although they’d do fine on a counter top for a week or two.

Yellow Onion These have a more classic onion flavor.

Zucchini Zucchini season is finally winding down so this will be the final week of zucchini
for the summer.
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Potatoes We haven’t washed these because we find it tricky to bag wet potatoes- if you put them in plastic bags while wet, they might mold; if you put them in paper bags or containers while wet, they’ll break through. So, we hope you don’t mind washing off a little dirt at home. 

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