August 9th, 2023
What’s in your share?
Heirloom and Slicing Tomatoes
Zucchini (the last ones)
Cucumbers (also probably the last ones)
Cherry Tomatoes
Green Beans or Shishitos
Dark Red Norland Potatoes*
Fresh Garlic*
Eggplant (do you hate us yet?)
*Fresh Garlic - is not fully cure yet, meaning that the skins separating the clove still have moisture in them, making them super easy to peel! This garlic is meant to be eaten within the month because it wont store as long as fully cured garlic.
*Dark Red Norland Potatoes - are “new” potatoes, meaning they are freshly dug potatoes meant for fresh eating. The skins are thin and fragile because they haven’t been cured and the flesh is super tender.
This week’s harvest
It’s peak tomato season! We’ve harvesting the first flush of tomatoes, which is usually the heaviest harvest of the season. You all got three pounds of tomatoes, and it’s just a fraction of what we harvested. It seem insane to have so many tomatoes all at once, but because the first flush is the heaviest, we need to have as many plants as we do in order to keep tomatoes coming all season. These first couple weeks are gonna be tomato heavy, so I’ve included a few recipes to help navigate the abundance. Sauces, pastes, freezing, dehydrating, and canning are all ways you can preserve the bounty.
Tomatoes are our fussiest crop, requiring an early start, warm temps, and pruning every week throughout the season. They require lots of nutrients, water, and hours of sunlight. They are prone to disease and like warm weather, but not too hot or their skins and flowers burn. We grow them in our high tunnels, using the tall infrastructure to trellis the plants as we prune them to one vine, training them to climb vertically instead of bushing out and becoming a wild mess.
Workshare, John, reminded us of panzenalla salad the other day when he told us about how his mom made it. We added zucchini and cucumber, cut into ribbons using a veggie peeler.
We seed tomatoes in our propagation house during the last week of March. They grow fast once they germinate, so we move them into bigger cells every two weeks, until they are ready to go into little pots, which they remain in until they get planted in the field during the first week of May. Being able to close the high tunnel walls and doors at night helps to conserve the warmth from the sun and keep the nightly temperature at least five degrees warmer than outside, which can mean the difference between frost or no frost (which tomatoes cannot endure). From May through the end of July, no fruits are borne, but they require weekly maintenance. We prune the plants to one vine - in the past we’ve done two vines, but we’ve gotten smaller tomatoes and we like big ones - and wrap them vertically around twine that is hung on the cross braces of the high tunnel. Pruning tomatoes is sticky, sweaty, and technical, and Ali has been doing the majority of the pruning this season.
Making Tomato Paste is a little time consuming, but worth it if you’re swimming in tomatoes!
Finally, at the end of July, we start seeing the first blush. The crew always gets the first tomatoes and its always cause for a minor celebration. Then comes the madness. Tomatoes are extremely perishable and they don’t want to be stored colder than 50 degrees, so we never put them in our walk-in cooler. Because we don’t have an in-between cooler (ideally 55-65 degrees), we need to be very careful about how we store the tomatoes, or fruit flies become rampant. I have created the “ABC” rule for myself during tomato season. “Always Be Canning” is a real thing. We also have several die hard ABC-ers among our members who buy “seconds” from us annually. If you’d like to become one of them, just let us know! We preserve anything that has a cosmetic blemish, because we don’t want to give any of you tomatoes that are cracked, squishy, or juicy. Y’all only see the beautiful side of tomatoes, but I have mild trauma that comes along with them. If you’ve ever dug into a crate of tomatoes and accidentally poked your finger into a soggy, moldy tomato, you’ll know what I mean. Being able to move tomatoes or preserve them is an around the clock job that only adds to the mayhem of August.
We hope you enjoy the tomatoes! There’s only a couple months in Wisconsin to get local tomatoes, and there’s nothing like it, so enjoy it while they’re here.
Recipes to try
Bruschetta (I really like this recipe because, similar to the panzanella method, it has you draw out some of the moisture from the tomatoes, making for less soggy crostinis.
Dramatic tomato shot. Just discovered “portrait mode” !