Harvest #18 (Week B) should include lettuce, kale, arugula, garlic, leeks, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, sweet peppers, hot peppers, basil, okra, Italian dandelion, beets, and radishes. U-pick should include flowers and herbs.

The 2020 outdoor seeding and transplanting season is finished. The last of the available/planned for field space was filled with the final round of external transplants and a last gasp direct seeding event to fill in the extra available bed space still vacant after transplanting. With the subsequent inch of rain received early Thursday morning the outdoor planting season was successfully concluded. This isn't the end of 2020 planting, though. We still have 2,300 feet of beds under cover, in the tunnels, to fill with crops to be harvested in November, December, and perhaps into winter 2021. There'll be a 2-3 week gap before we begin planting inside so at least we'll have a brief departure from one task we've been doing for almost six months.

Prior to establishing these indoor populations each tunnel space will require different methods of attention to achieve ideal conditions for planting into. Some tunnels house our seedling flats and need to have tables and landscape fabric removed followed by forking, hoeing, and raking. The movable high tunnel beds are able to be prepped with the tractor's bed shapers. This space was experimentally covered with large pieces of fabric for two weeks to passively kill grass and weeds and reduce the need for tractor tillage. After the bed shaping is finished we'll move the 30'x96' high tunnel over top. The hoop tunnel currently protects the 2nd and final round of tomatoes which will soon need to be pulled and composted and the beds will be forked, hoed, and raked. We should receive our new tunnels this week which will be erected to cover an additional 900' of bed space.

During this upcoming week we hope to harvest the rest of the potatoes. Spent summer crops like cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, and tomatillos will be cleaned up. New transplants will probably require cultivation. Some fields beckon the flail mower. Certain crops request hand weeding. More seeds will be sown for Late Fall harvest. A lot of time will be spent harvesting and distributing.

Please join us at a workshift if you can!

Workshifts will be held rain or shine. If it's raining we'll probably process garlic in the barn. When it's dry we'll probably harvest potatoes or pull some weeds.

Workshifts scheduled for this week:

As I said last week, the up and down weather makes it difficult for me to figure out what to cook each night, but one of the 'themes' in our meals this past week has been salads that use veggies other than lettuce since the lettuce is limited right now. Vegetables stand up to more robust dressings which are a nice change from the simple vinaigrettes that are my normal go-tos. So try a few of them. Below is some of what I did this past week:

Eggplant, peppers, onions - grilled them all - I figure the eggplants and peppers won't be around much longer so I should enjoy the tasty summer veggies while I can. I made an Asian style dressing for the leftovers and added to brown rice for a tasty side dish salad.

Carrots, edamame, onion, garlic, cilantro - made the Edamame and Carrot Salad with Rice Vinegar recipe on this site. It was a nice change of pace since most of what we had been eating as salads lately were tomato based.

Eggplant, hot pepper, onion, garlic, basil, mint - made the Thai-Style Grilled Eggplant Salad recipe from this site. Since we have the hot peppers, I used them instead of the red pepper flakes.

Arugula - we LOVE arugula! The simplest way to make it into a salad is to rough chop or tear it, cut some cherry tomatoes in half and place both into a bowl. Put a little salt and pepper into the bowl, squeeze fresh lemon juice to taste and drizzle a good quality olive oil into the bowl - it doesn't need much. Mix well, but gently because arugula bruises easily and enjoy!

Kale - made Kale Caesar Salad and served sliced, leftover steak on top of it. Yum!

Please share how you enjoyed your harvest by emailing me at lindadansbury@comcast.net and please put Anchor Run in the subject line.

It has been a banner year for peppers, both hot and sweet. The harvest of each will start to wane soon, and you might be thinking "good, because I don't know what to do with more peppers". Well, you can freeze them for one. Yes, they won't be crunchy when defrosted, but they are still delicious when added to chili and Mexican inspired soups and stews. I talked about the Pepper Puree in last week's post and that is a great option for preserving the peppers. Another delicious and flexible way to preserve the peppers is to make Romesco Sauce. It freezes very well and is great on grilled bread, chicken, fish, or pretty much anything!

I always freeze my hot peppers whole and then I can use them in all sorts of dishes throughout the year, until the fresh ones roll in again next summer. Whenever a cooked recipe calls for red pepper flakes or a hot pepper, I just take one or part of one out of the freezer and use what I want. They lose their crispness, but not their color - just place in a freezer bag, squeeze out the air and seal.