Goodbye to Summer

It seems that fall weather has really set in and the remains of the summer vegetables are showing it. I picked lots of exploded cherry tomatoes today, but only enough intact ones to give a couple per share. Cucumbers and summer squash are still holding on enough that most shares have them today. The greens are looking good and I harvested more 5 Color Silverbeet (chard) today, which has bounced back beautifully from the clean up two weeks ago. Lettuce is also still coming and we have a week or two more of that in the field before we switch over to chicories. I did a small initial pick on celery today. This is not the kind of celery you'd make "ants on a log" with, this is for flavoring other dishes, like soup, and you can use the leaves as well as the stems. It kind of feels like soup weather, doesn't it? I also cleaned up the thyme planting so there a small bunch of that, which can also be dried if you don't want to use it right away. The peppers are still coloring very slowly, so I've harvested one with just a little color and if you leave it on the counter for a few days or a week it will color completely and be very sweet. The variety for today is Jimmy Nardello, which looks like a hot pepper, but is actually one of the sweetest peppers I've ever had. Last week some of you got a Little Finger eggplant. Today some of the other pick up sites are getting them. I've been making a lot of thai curries lately and one or two of these would be perfect to chop up and toss into a bit of coconut milk with some chili paste and fish sauce and simmer until it's soft.

I was bold today and pulled out all of the irrigation from the field to make it easier to do the weeding and path maintenance we need to do. It looks like we're going to have a decent amount of moisture this week. At this point I'm actually hoping for a little rain tomorrow and Wednesday. The plants are also growing much more slowly with the cooler, shorter days so they're not using as much water.