2015 Week 6 - Tomatoes...

...are here. I am glad to pass them along to you. The heat that could have ruined the broccoli and cauliflower is likely responsible for getting these to maturity. This is a little early for me to have these, but I decided to grow some tomatoes in my greenhouse this year as an experiment. 


Here's this week's inventory:

Squash Pickles (paid shares only)
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Kale
Beets
Early Tomatoes
Mint

These are among the first tomatoes from my greenhouse, the orange/red ones are early girls, which are a dependable early hybrid tomato. The flavor isn't amazing, but they aren't bad. Since most of the other tomatoes I will be giving you are a little funky, I thought a tomato that you might more easily recognize would be nice to see in your share once in a while. The other tomato is a tie dye heirloom. It tastes great. Not as good as some other heirlooms you will get later in the year, but pretty good.

Broccoli rears it's ugly head again (its a pun!!!!!), this time it is a true broccoli variety instead of the stir fry broccoli I have been giving you. I got really lucky that it cooled down last week and rained a lot. If those high temps would have stuck around, this broccoli would have suffered.

The cauliflower this week looks weird, I know. It is green cauliflower (unfortunately not a perfect green because I didn't blanch the plants). It is supposed to be green, don't worry. It tastes like cauliflower, though. I checked.

I made some bread and butter pickles out of the squash that got too big to do much else with. I hope you all like them! Also, if you aren't going to reuse them, I would like to get the jars back, because I will definitely use them again.

This is the last week I plan to give you all beets for a while. If you still have beets left from last week, you can use these together with them.

There is also mint, which I chew on fairly often. When I traveled around the middle east a bunch of years ago, many Arabs would welcome you to their home by asking if you wanted coffee or tea. Arab coffee is basically espresso, which isn't always wonderful in the middle of the summer. But their tea was usually mint tea, which I loved. The great thing is, mint tea is just mint steeped for a few minutes in boiling water. Unfortunately, you need a tool, a reusable tea bag or french press to do it right, because the tea will be better if you chop up the mint first. If you don't have either of those, you can just put some mint sprigs in a mug and pour boiling water over it and stir it around. Also, here are some other ideas.