CSA Farm Share 2009: Week 8

[surrealestate]

Late summer and harvest really kicks into high gear! Meanwhile, Red Fire reports that they've already lost 1/4 of their (HUGE, so there's still plenty left) tomato crop to the Blight. Hopefully the rest will be safe, but I fear for future updates. Steve tells me his crop is still clear and hopefully it will stay that way.

In urban homesteading news, my tomatoes are still thriving and we ate the first one of the season this weekend! If the Blight hit, it would absolutely break my heart and I really feel for the hundreds of farmers and thousands of home gardeners who have lost all or part of their crop. None of mine are from big box stores, but neither were the acres of fields lost by local farmers, of course, and I have no idea where the neighbors got their plants. The rest of the garden is also doing great.

Late last week, with Mark's invaluable help, I started a half-bushel of cucumbers on their journey toward half-sour dill picklehood. Real, fermented, old-school pickles, which I will soon taste to see how they're doing. And for those who might be wondering, that's about 25 pounds, which is a LOT. I turned the ones that didn't make the cut into Sweet Swedish Refrigerator Pickles.

Finally, I racked the hefeweizen onto blackberries (harvested from the backyard and frozen in earlier years, then thawed and pureed) and it is a lovely shade of purplish-pink. I also received my scores from the Sam Adams Long Shot contest. I submitted my dunkelweizen (Froggy's Slam Dunk) and I think I did pretty well: 34.5, which is on the high end of the "Very Good" category. Given the obvious flaw (I underfilled the bottles and it ended up a bit undercarbonated), I am very happy with that result, and judges' comments were generally quite positive. I've never entered a homebrew contest before so I don't really have anything else to go on. Seems okay to me, anyway. Maybe I'll scan and post the sheets.

• 1 bunch spring onions
• 1/2 bunch beets
• 1 lb new potatoes
• 1 summer squash
• 1/2 bunch arugula
• 1 cucumber
• 1 mini red cabbage
• 1/2 head bibb lettuce
• 1/2 pound cauliflower
• 1/2 bunch basil
  --
• 1/2 bunch scallions
• 1/2 bunch yellow chard
• 3 ears corn
• 1/2 lb carrots
• 1/2 head romaine lettuce
• 1 tomato
• 2 zucchinis
• 1 cucumber
• 1/2 bunch cilantro
• 1/2 head cabbage
  --
• 1/2 pint blueberries
• 1/2 small watermelon

Comments

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Yeah, I realize that's a risk, but the odds of winning are so low and I think if it actually happened, the coolness factor would outweigh the loss of recipe ownership. (You also don't actually give them the recipe unless you're a finalist.) I wonder how they work that exactly, anyway... I mean, I don't think they stop you from continuing to brew it at home -- you just can't sell it. A lot of the finalist recipes were posted publicly before they even entered the contest, too.

All-grain. I've never done an extract brew.