CSA: Week 16

In your share:

• 1 pound of "ugly" garlic - not pictured, oops!
• golden beets
• cucumbers
• carrots
• zucchini
• kale
• sweet Walla Walla onions
• Italian Parsley
• Cilantro - last of the season
• squash
• basil
• filet beans

"Ugly" garlic is not our highest quality product, but it's still completely edible and tastes just the same as those looking more "perfect".  As we cut and clean an entire year's garlic crop, there's always some that don't meet up to the high standard of large cloves and beautiful white skin.  This can be caused by several factors, but usually, it's soil quality issues or drying out in the ground too long.  Instead of tossing out the "ugly" bulbs,  it's quite common for large garlic farmers to sort out the low grade (aka "ugly) bulbs and sell them off to make garlic powder or seasoning mixes.  Since we need to keep back our very best garlic bulbs to plant for next year's crop, our CSA members will get a generous supply of "ugly" garlic, to eat fresh as you would with any other garlic, or to you too can experiment with dehydrating it to make fresh garlic powder.  It's easy.  Just peel, slice thin, dehydrate, then turn into powder with a small coffee grinder.  It's best to grind in only small batches at a time as it tends to clump (because it's fresh and not full of preservatives.)

Monday kept me on my toes.  One of the forecasts we check daily predicted a low of 28 and that's a cold we take very seriously.  So I spent my morning harvesting our most sensitive crops like basil, zucchini, cucumbers, and squash - just in case it really did freeze that hard.  Then in the afternoon, I got out row covers for all our crops.  Double row covers.  Okay, and 4 covers on our precious garlic.  And heaters for greenhouses 5 & 6.  Whew.  It was a lot of work.  Then... it didn't freeze that night.  Tuesday's forecast was 30.  Knowing better than to tempt fate or Mother Nature, we covered again Tuesday night and yes, it did freeze that time.  This brought our "2018 frost free" streak to an end.  June 2nd to August 28th is 88 days frost free.  Quite a long stretch actually.  And it's one of the reasons many of our crops are doing so well this year.  (I remember a year we only had 45 frost free nights.  And one year we went as long as 95!) 

Have a great week and ENJOY your veggies!

Tara