Farm Shares for August 23, 2023

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We are hiring! We have a full-time and part-time positions available. The full-time position is farm/field based. The part time positions include some flexibility between Tues & Wed or Fri & Saturday and focus on pack-room, distribution, and market booth. Please see details on our website here and forward this to anyone you may think is interested. We also have staff members rotating through vacation days, so we are significantly short-staffed over the next few weeks. We may put out a plea for temporary help from any available Farm Share members!

We started harvesting our Green Beans last week. Actually, some of the beans are Purple or light Yellow. They all taste the same! But we love the color diversity. 

While the farm is cranking out vegetables that, botanically, are actually fruits, our household goes into food preservation mode! We pressure can 80-100 jars of our tomatoes each year and love them through the cooler months. We also preserve things from our personal gardens - mostly grown by our children. Their crops include mushrooms, dent corn (for drying), paprika peppers, elderberries, figs, and apples. (Earlier in the year they froze their strawberry, cherry, mulberry, and blueberry crops.) It's a very busy time but exciting to put food by for later. We love eating a combination of seasonal food and food we preserved! 

Suggestions for crops we're harvesting now include...

BEETS - Our beloved mentioned Beet Smoothie. Or steam them then chill them and put on top of salads galore. Or roast them and serve them alongside evvvvverything. 

A medley of Tomatoes, Peppers, Cucumbers, and Basil go wonderfully in recipes like this Bean Salad, or this Quinoa Salad, or this recipe below. There are many similar recipes. Have fun! 

Pro tip: These salads often don't keep well as leftovers. The cucumber in salads like these usually goes bad before other ingredients, in our experience. So mix up a quantity that you'll eat within a reasonable time. We like to keep cooked beans (we buy them dry then soak and cook them) and/or cooked quinoa on hand and then add in fresh vegetables and herbs for one day's lunch and/or dinner. 

SWEET BULLHORN PEPPERS - The heroes of the second half of July and all of August are these Italian Bullhorn peppers. They are like bell peppers, but better! They grow better than bell peppers in organic conditions, and they taste better, too! Eat them raw, roast them, stuff them... the second photo below comes to us from Fine Creek Brewing. We're just starting to harvest these peppers this week, but we hope for abundant harvests from them soon. See our collection of Pepper recipes here. 

SHISHITO PEPPERS - These are frying peppers. Saute them WHOLE (stems and everything!) in the oil of your choice until they blister, then sprinkle with sea salt. To eat: pick up a pepper by the stem, bite the pepper up to the stem and enjoy their amazing flavor. So, so good. 

LUNCHBOX PEPPERS - These are snack size sweet peppers. We prefer to eat them raw, on their own, as a snack. But you can slice them on salads or stuff with cheese and roast.