Harvest Notes Week 15

Sweet Peppers All the peppers in your share that aren’t a jalapeño are sweet. Slice them up for raw salads with tomatoes, roast them for sandwiches or to puree into soup with tomatoes, add them to stir fries or chilis or sauce-, they are super versatile!


Jalapeno The small green peppers are spicy jalapeños. The little marks on their skin are a sign of maturity and heat.


Onions These are strong- they’ll definitely make you cry when you chop! They may have some aesthetic problems on the skin but they are yummy and should store well on your counter top.


Peaches Peaches?!! We harvested these from a neighbor’s unsprayed orchard. If yours are a little firm, leave themon the counter for a day or two. If they are soft, eat them up or store in the fridge until you’re ready.


Cherry Tomatoes Sometimes these split when super ripe- you’ve likely experienced that already. They are still yummy when that happens, just know that you’ll need to eat them right away when they split because they won’t store well once the juice is exposed.


Lettuce Mix These baby greens are tender and yummy for salad.


Cucumber Our succession of late season cucumbers is offering up a trickle of a harvest. Late season cucurbits (the plant family that includes cucumbers, zucchini, melons, etc.) struggle to combat disease pressure that builds up over the course of the season. Good thing we got to enjoy an abundance in early summer!


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 The round tomatoes in your share 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 among your tomatoes so you can eat the ripest first and keep the less ripe ones on your counter top for a few days.