Hello Members to a lovely RAINY Friday!  It has finally rained enough to make a difference to the parched fields!

This week’s share has the following items:

Cucumbers-  Mostly Japanese Spineless and the Boothby Blond again.

Dill- Make pickles or a tasty cucumber salad with this.

Cilantro- Also great with the cucumbers.

Summer Squash-  We picked several times this week but are still struggling to keep up with these plants. You can make a great soup base for the freezer with these.  Cube them and cook down in a large soup pot with water and onion.  Once they are soft turn the heat off and season them to taste, then puree with a hand held blender or a counter top blender.  You can freeze this and use it whenever as a base to add other ingredients to.  We like to add fresh cilantro and garlic with a bit of sour cream on top.

Garlic

Kale

Potatoes- Nicola again this week.  Nico helped to make some yummy baked fries with these last night.

Eggplants- Japanese

Pumpkins-  (Thank you climate changes)  We were thinking maybe we could move Halloween up to the end of July this year since all of our pumpkins seem to think it is time to ripen now…think of the costume possibilities!  These are sugar pumpkins so try to cook them up into something delicious.  Leave them somewhere you can enjoy them for one week so they can cure a bit as we just picked these today.   Pumpkin cookies, pumpkin soup?  I know it’s hard, we aren’t really having weather that makes you want to slave over the stove top with warm pumpkin stew, maybe on one of these rainier days…

Cabbage

Beets- After this round beets are on hiatus until the second planting comes in.

Farm Activities:  We have pretty much wrapped up all of the planting for this season, hooray!  The field on Tower Rd is getting pretty weedy so we are preparing to plant it to cover crops for the fall.  Our field at the Charlemont Academy is doing great, see the picture.  About a quarter of the space was cover cropped and our fall planting is fresh in the ground.  The tomatoes are looking beautiful.  As is evidenced by the pumpkins in your share this week, the winter squash is moving right along too.

If anyone has forgotten to bring a tote back lately it is okay, but our pile is starting to look a little scarce…:)

We are teaming up with the bag share project, http://www.thebagshare.org to bring you a supply of reusable produce bags at the Berkshire Market.  These bags were sewn from fabric waste at the cushion shop I work at.  Volunteers sewed bags out of the scrap and they will be available for all to use at the Berkshire market in case they forget their own bag.  This is an AWESOME program, visit their site to find out more.  Not only are we keeping the scraps out of the landfill but we are forgoing the use of a plastic bag!  I read something recently that said part of a revolution can be unplugging from the systems you don’t believe in, this is a great way to do that.

I hope everyone enjoyed the cloudier, cooler week!