Here is a newsletter for a glimpse into life on the farm and in the garden. It describes many of the unique vegetable varieties we still grow. I wrote it for the 2001 growing season but it seems timeless.

HOW DOES OUR GARDEN GROW?
The summer harvests have been a bounty from the earth—we’re currently harvesting the final days of our summer vegetables and the beginning of our fall crops.

CSA members are enjoying heirloom tomato varieties of all shapes, stripes and colors! Our favorites? Sweet orange Sungold cherry tomatoes, candy from the garden; trusty orange Valencia (nice mild flavor and they never split!); Cherokee Purple, despite green shoulders, a rich red-purple slicer; and Old German, a sweet and fruity yellow tomato with red streaks of fire. Green Zebra is fun too, with two shades of green stripes that blush yellow when ripe.

The Japanese long eggplant are in peak harvest now; they fill a barrel with deep purple beauty. Our farm families are trying to be creative with our onslaught of mild yellow banana peppers—grill em, marinate em, slice em in salads. We’ve also got hot Anaheim, perfect for salsa and bell peppers, green and purple. The sweet basil just keeps coming, filling our freezers with pesto and basil butter. Its only now beginning to bolt. I like to freeze it in ice cube trays so I can toss a cube into pasta or a stir fry pan all winter. We had quite a summer squash season, with two kinds of long zucchini, a fun round hybrid we can’t resist called Eight Ball Zucchini, yellow crookneck, and white patty pans. A popular recipe for CSA members has been Zucchini-Crusted Pizza from the Moosewood Cookbook—it uses 2-4 cups of shredded zuke (yahoo!) to make a yummy pizza crust that’s a lot like a baked zucchini pancake. We’ve cured the winter squash, a beautiful display of butternuts, spaghetti, acorn and delicata.

A taste of summer was our heirloom Golden Bantam Sweet Corn—it’s not super-sweet like the local hybrids, just good old-fashioned corn taste. We planted Red Wiggler’s seed garlic last fall and CSA members got a bunch of that mid-summer. Fall roots are coming in—Bull’s Blood Beets (ooh!), striped beets, several kinds of carrots which sweeten with the frost, and turnips. We planted fall peas late so we hope they will be ready before the frost. The lima Limelight and Cannelli drying beans are ready to shell, after drying on the vine. We also enjoyed two plantings of green beans--young, tender green beans including gourmet French haricot verts and bush beans. We took a hiatus from spring leafy greens during the heat of the summer but now our fall plantings are ready—gourmet baby lettuce/mesclun mix so tender it feels like butter, Swiss chard and spinach.

One of these years I’ll get hundreds of pumpkins from all the plants I grow. This year we got about 40, just enough for our CSA families and decorations for the Peter Mayer concert in October. We had some pie pumpkins too, just big enough for the children to wrap their arms around. And fun gourds too, big bottlenecks that hollow and harden on the vine for Ilene to paint this winter, and little decorative striped gourds and miniature pumpkins. All these fall squash plants ran around under a thousand blooming sunflowers, taller than all the children and Ilene! (OK, even taller than the other adults too...) The sunflowers turned their brilliant yellow heads toward the sun in the morning and then turn the 180 degrees, all in a row, saluting the sun as it falls over the trees in the evening. Their bloom was a magnificent sight, and one we eagerly captured on our digital camera for the website. I was inspired by their brilliance, then honored by their somber change, when they hung their heads low, heavy with seed, the week of September 11.