Week 11: Next Week Schedule Change!
Tian Tian Farm Newsletter - August 14, 2024
Logistics
Beginning next week we will do all of our deliveries on Thursday. That is Thursday, August 22. We will be using all the same pick-up spots. Please let us know if you have any questions about the schedule shift!
This Week’s Share
Bok Choy
Shishito peppers
Moskvich slicing tomato
Sun gold cherry tomatoes
Kale
Cilantro flowers
Asian eggplant
Fresh red onion
Summer squash (or Unagi cucumber)
Normally when you buy an onion, it’s been left in a warm place to cure for a couple weeks. That process helps prolong its shelf life, making onions a great storage crop. But the fresh onions in your box have not been cured, so should be used within the next week or so.
Your cilantro flowers and accompanying greens will have a stronger cilantro flavor. Great for garnishing a dish on that special night.
Shishito peppers are a mild Japanese pepper. A favored preparation is blistering them with olive oil and salt.
Time
In some ways, farming grounds our sense of time. In other ways, it totally warps it. Here’s what I mean.
We know that — when daily temperatures rise above 75 or so — it takes roughly two and a half weeks for a bed of baby bok choy to fully mature. It takes about a week and a half for true leaves to emerge from most brassica seedlings. We’ve developed something of an internal clock tied to the growth cycle of our crops. It’s not something we really pay attention to. We have our spreadsheets telling us when to plant what and when, but honestly, at some point, that mostly gets abandoned, and we just ride the growth cycle.
And then we leave for a week, or three days, or we get hit with scorching temperatures, or we get pelted with hail, and everything goes to hell. This season has brought its share of predictable and unpredictable gaps away from the farm — weddings, memorials — and we’ve lost a sense of control we’ve had in previous years. Weeds are crawling everywhere and going to seed. Spent crops are decaying, crinkling away, waiting for us to belatedly deliver them to our compost pile. After you get over the stress of all the unfinished work staring at you in the face, and surrender to the chaos, you realize you were never really in control, and that’s freeing. And so we continue to ride.
Recipe
Try roasting your cherry tomatoes this week!
‘Til next week,
Steven