We are eating a lot of simple food these days: steamed green beans with butter and salt, grilled peppers, zucchini, or eggplant, tomatoes sliced with basil and balsamic, and cucumbers with lemon. Summer food speaks for itself and for the most part we are letting the flavors of the vegetables shine through on their own.
What are you eating these days? I'd love to hear.
On the farm we harvested our cooking onions, as well as a few rows of shallots and cippolini onions that we are trialing. We are curing them in our Mongolian yurt, it's a brightly painted palace to onions. Did you know we used to live in a yurt? This is what it looks like: https://groovyyurts.com/gallery/. The onions will cure for 1-2 weeks at which point we will clean and store them so that we can offer them to our members throughout the fall and winter. Our red onions still need a bit of time, we'll know they are ready to be pulled when the tops fall over onto the ground, signalling maturity.
A few notes: the peppers are toast. We've harvested all the ripe ones and the plants stopped creating more when the aphids hit them hard. We did release some lacewing eggs and larvae which should prey on the aphids, but the plants are very weak and there isn't a great many weeks of warm season growing left. Sorry folks!
The spinach is also looking pretty sad for the coming 2 weeks. I mentioned a downy mildew issue several weeks back and that's what we are dealing with once again. I've switched varieties three times this season but haven't found one with sufficient resistance. I've ordered some other seed recommended by my favorite seed company and hope to get us all back to swimming in spinach very soon! In the meantime I'd recommend substituting baby kale or arugula for another salad green that can be eaten cooked or raw, or Swiss chard as a alternative cooking green that is in the same plant family (and therefore shares a similar nutrient profile).
That's all for now friends, happy eating until next time!
Tamara
