Important Announcement....Due to the 4th of July holiday, Friday folks should plan to pick up their CSA shares on Thursday, July 3rd this week.
Pick-up this week will be re-located to the newly renovated long barn. We are in love with this expanse of space and hope you will appreciate the beautiful timber frame work so lovingly completed by our friends Michael Alderson, Jon Courtney and Robbie Alden. We had a great month working and sharing meals (and afternoon coffee) with them and watching their craft. A HUGE and bountiful thanks to these three for all their dedication to restoring the barn for all of us! It is a truly special space.
One of my favorite activities is to walk through the garden and harvest food for dinner. I love the cooler temperatures of the evening and the shadows as the sun hangs lower in the sky. This past week, the end of the afternoon rain revealed a glorious rainbow and a yellow haze in the hours before dusk as the storm front moved past and the sun set below the clouds. Breath taking beauty. Sorry, no picture-- we were just livin' it. Harvesting directly from the garden for dinner is a task I savor and take time for. This week, I dove indulgently into the peas and harvested a full skirts load (defined as a load of produce carried to the kitchen in the fabric of one's skirt).
We are slowly getting to a point in summer when we no longer need to restrain ourselves from garden vegetables. Of course there are always some crops that do not do as well, and we need to Hold Back ("H.B." is in common parlance at our house.) In the early part of the season, like the last few weeks, we have been eating a mess of pac choi as we try to clear out the row to use for another crop. Back to the PEAS of this week: I turned them into a delicious topping for homemade pizza, with a handful of garlic scapes, mozzarella made from Dulsie's milk and farm cured proccuitto. The peas were divine. The whole experience of them was divine...the color, the taste, the appearance on the vine and the feeling of the snap they make when harvested.
Like strawberries, peas come on in a bell curve and we are at the beginning. But never fear....there are 2 succession plantings of peas and tons of blossoms on these plants so you will all get your fill of these snap peas before the season's through. They are best raw off the vine since the sugars start to change to starch once they are harvested (a good reason to volunteer this week or next to help with the harvest). In fact, peas are hard to come by in the grocery store because by the time they would land in your shopping basket, they would already be starchy. Peas are a garden original.
This weeks Harvest:
Peas
Strawberries
lettuce
chives
mizuna
broccoli
The strawberries this week will be small but wicked flavorful. We are picking pints of sparkle strawberries, which are by far the best! They are little burst of sugar and berry goodness. They ripen after the large, earli-glow you have been eating the last few weeks. If you make it home with this pint of strawberries, you possess a willpower greater than most.Hope the holiday weekend offers you time to relax with family and friends.
Blessings on the meal,
Stacy and John
I had to laugh when I read about H.B....in our family, we have F.H.B. (family hold back) for when there is company and maybe not quite enough of a dish. A quiet announcement was made before dinner, like "It's FHB on the potatoes tonight." Now I wonder,who else might have grown up with this?
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