9/24/26 Harvest Notes- Endless Summer
Or maybe the title should read “End this summer!” to accurately express our feelings. Hope everyone got at least a taste of the hit and run showers around town this week. Looking forward to more humane conditions soon.
Farmer’s Pick Half Share: sweet potatoes, salad mix, sweet potato greens, basil
Farmer’s Pick Full Share: Salad mix, sweet potato greens, okra, salad turnips, heirloom Texas Gourdseed cornmeal, basil
**Sometimes one or two farmers pick shares may have an item substituted if we don’t have it right at the moment we pack, so if your share doesn’t exactly match the above that’s why. Usually it does match though!
This week’s notes:
We wanted to highlight the Japanese Salad Turnips as being this week’s seasonal star. This is the first plausibly fall-ish crop that comes in (being somewhat heat tolerant for a root vegetable as long is it receives unreal amounts of irrigation), and having them this week reduces our seasonal dysphoria somewhat. If you haven’t had these yet, you are in for a treat that can only come from a local farm, you’ll never find it in a store because they don’t keep very well. Unlike a regular turnip, these are for eating fresh and raw (hence the name Salad Turnip). They’re sweet and tangy and crunchy and juicy! And please don’t forget to keep the greens. To an extent most root tops are edible, but turnip greens are the only ones we truly love. Even Cracker Barrel has turnip greens on the menu. We plan on having these available every week for the rest of the season so everyone should get a turn (turn-ip?) and then some.
We’re pressed for time this week so for the rest of our notes we will rehash our recommendations for vegetable storage we sent out last season. Nothing more disheartening than seeing some beautiful radishes turn to mush in your fridge!
Let's talk about greens first since they tend to be the most perishable. Greens desperately need to stay hydrated, ideally both cold and wet, to slow down the decomposition process. It seems like that would be easy in the fridge but it's unfortunately kind of a terrible place for greens if you're not using it properly. Cold air is by definition dry air (inside the fridge or out), so if greens are kept in the cold we need to conserve moisture in some way. Fridges compound this issue by circulating air, essentially creating a cold dry breeze inside, desiccating your beautiful kale as much as a north wind does on a January day up on the high plains. My recommendation for greens is to keep them slightly damp and in an airtight container. A great example of this are salad bags. You've probably noticed your salad tends to keep much longer than your kale. That's because the salad bag follows the rule of keeping the greens out of the dry fridge air. For things that are hard to keep in a bag or other container, such as a big bunch of collard greens, I recommend you treat them like cut flowers and keep the stem in water. Anything with a cut stem can take up water into the leaves this way for days or even weeks. The water part is the most critical part, greens will keep better in water at room temp on your counter than without water at fridge temp!
For root veggies the rules are similar. Keep them out of the cold dry air and put them into a container. I would actually go ahead and cut off the roots from the greens. Toss the roots in a bag and the greens in a glass of water. Keeping roots attached to the leaves tends to make the roots soft after only a few days in the fridge, so I usually cut them off before storage.
Once you're outside those two categories the rules kind of break down. Potatoes and bulbing onions actually like to be cold and dry. Summer produce like eggplants, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers want to be at a cold room temp (upper 60s F). This can actually be hard to achieve in the summer here since homes tend to be more in the mid to upper 70s but fridges are around 40F. If you're keeping those items for just a few days, out on the counter fine. If you're trying to keep them until next week or the week after, refrigerate for sure. There's also a lot of mythology around tomato storage temperatures. People like to act like anything below 70 degrees will kill the flavor, this isn't true actually! Research shows the ideal tomato temp is actually in the 50s, and temps into the 40s and high 30s do little to no harm either for a week or more. And then there's always random exceptions, like basil that like to be kept warm and wet instead of cold and wet. So that's all very confusing, but if we just stick to the general rule of keeping the majority of things cold and wet, you'll come out ahead.