In Your Share (Sept 9th edition)

Roma Tomatoes  tomatoes are in full swing this week! Some of the romas are good fresh eating tomatoes, but they’re really meant for cooking. The thick walls & meaty flesh make them easy to peel and the inner core has relatively few seeds and much less juice than slicing or heirloom tomatoes. Our favorite varieties include…

• Striped Roman – You can see from the photo how striking this variety is with it’s red and yellow stripes running lengthwise along the fruit.
• Viva Italia – The classic!
• Monica – Tasty, productive and BIG.
• Ropreco – This is our first year growing this Italian heirloom recommended for our region by Adaptive Seeds. It also has good resistance to blossom end rot which can be especially challenging in the romas sometimes.

Your Recipe Packet this week has a couple of quick tomato sauce recipes that also use the greens, peppers and parsley. Also variations on tabbouleh and a traditional greek tzatziki.

This week your share may include…

• Corn: This will probably be the last week of corn but we’re happy to have such a good long run of it!
• Cucumbers: You’ll see a few different varieties in the share this week. Of the classic green cucumbers we’re growing two different kinds – Marketmore 76 is long, slender and slightly knobby while Diva is shorter, fatter and has a smooth skin. Both have great flavor.  There will also be some heirloom Lemon cucumbers in the mix – they have the round shape and yellow color of a lemon but taste like a cucumber.
• Garlic: We’ve had a few weeks without garlic while the heads were curing in the barn. The heads are completely dry now and we’ve started to trim the tops and roots off to get them ready for share and longer term storage. Happy to have one of our favorite varieties Music back in the share.
• Kale: We always plant several different varieties of kale midsummer. A few years ago, on the advice of some farmer friends we started growing Russian Hunger Gap. It got its name because it flowers much later in the spring than other kales and the raab is tasty and much appreciated in the surprisingly lean month of May. If also provides us with beautiful and tasty leaves from late summer all the way through the winter into early spring.
• Lettuce Heads: Beautiful red heads of Batavian crisp leaf lettuce, Cherokee.
• Parsley: Nice big bunches of flat leaf parsley.
• Hot Peppers: The classic green jalapeños are pretty hot and the Czech Black have a bit less heat.
• Heirloom Tomatoes: I posted about some of my favorite heirlooms last week and you can check it out again here if you want to.
• Slicing Tomatoes:  The slicing tomatoes are at their peak with this late season heat wave.
• Roma Tomatoes: Time to make some tomato sauce!!

Coming soon… Jimmy Nardello Peppers!