Another beautiful summer day on… checks notes… October 15th?? We almost want the endless summer to stick around for the sake of the okra machine but we’ll be good and ready to move on to some cooler weather! The shares reflect the seasons finally catching up with the calendar, you’ll notice our offerings will be heavier on the cooler season crops and lighter on hot weather produce in future weeks.
Farmer’s Pick Half Share: okra, bok choi, basil, sweet potato greens
Farmer’s Pick Full Share: okra, salad mix, radish, turnips, collard greens, cucumber
**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!
Tomato update: I know folks are eagerly awaiting tomatoes. We are too! This has been the absolutely most brutal autumn imaginable for tomatoes unfortunately. We are still anticipating at least some, but they will be delayed until the end of the October most likely. This is for two reasons. First of all, the pest pressure has been immense, particularly the spider mites. We are an organic farm so some tools are off the table to fight this pest. The other bigger issue has been the warm nights. Nights recently have been as warm as 79 degrees, which is August weather, not October weather! This matters big time for tomatoes. They are relatively OK with high daytime temps, but nights for most varieties need to cool off at least a bit for them to develop fruit. This makes sense when you recall that tomatoes are essentially a desert species from the foothills of the Andes, so they’re much more at home in places with warm days and cool nights (if you’ve ever driven by the huge tomato greenhouse between Fort Davis and Marfa, there’s a reason that’s located in the Davis Mountains and not in, say, Corpus Christi).
This week’s seasonal star is: bok choi! I don’t have quite as much to say about bok choi as I do about other things we grow, but I think it can be an underrated crop for South Texas so I want expand on that a bit. Folks may not realize it but the eastern half of Texas (and the South in general) has a very similar climate to southern China. This is what geographers call a humid subtropical climate, meaning that it has hot humid summers but is also exposed to sharp arctic blasts from Russia or Canada in the winter meaning it isn’t fully tropical. Only a few places on earth have climates like this, the others being parts of southern Europe and South America. This is more than trivia though, there are lessons to be learned here from other regions. The Chinese have had an economy built on the productive power of small farmers for millennia, and vegetables form a larger portion of their diet than the typical Westerner. In those millennia, those small farmers have developed many variations on a theme of a particular species, Brassica rapa. From this one species we have not only bok choi but also napa cabbage, tatsoi, choy sum, mizuna, turnips, komatsuna and others! Crunchy and tangy would generally be the words to describe most of these. These broadly are categorized in the West as “Asian greens”, and they grow very well here, particularly in the autumn when the weather is still warm but the days are short and the insect pressure is lower than in the spring. So, if you’re looking for climate appropriate vegetables for your garden, look east!
For the kitchen, bok choi when fresh has a very crunchy yet juicy stem that is absolutely ideal for sauteeing. A very easy side dish for bok choi (especially baby bok choi) is to simply boil for a minute or two (just enough to get it wilted but still a bit crunchy), and then make a dipping sauce out of soy sauce and sesame oil. That will cost you $12 a plate at the sushi bar but a lot less on your own table for just a few minutes work!