Morning Song Farm News

Greetings from Morning Song! You'll notice we're harvesting our guavas this week at last! This is the first week of harvest as they're just coming in. Leave on counter until they are slightly soft when pressed, much like you would an avocado. Some people enjoy the skin as I do, others cut long-wise and scoop the delicious flesh out as you would a melon. I like them right out of hand, but have also sliced, frozen and used in smoothies. I also leave the skin on, and slice thin and include in salads. The skin has a minty kind of flavor when perfectly ripe.

Everything in our boxes this week is identifiable except perhaps the sapotes, upper right in the photo image above. Like avocados, they need to soften after harvest; they will not soften on the tree. Like most subtropical fruit, they are best left unrefrigerated. Leave on your counter until they are slightly soft when pressed and then cut open as you would an avocado. The white, creamy flesh is delicious! Some people enjoy the skin, which is slightly bitter. Others scoop out the flesh and toss the very thin skin. You can also scoop out the flesh and freeze, and add to an ice cream recipe or smoothie. Enjoy!

We're excited to see the blackberries come in so well this year despite reduced watering. They are being picked dead ripe, so won't stay fresh for very long. Some years we've tried picking a little unripe, however what's true is that picking dead ripe insures full flavor. The downside is they don't last long! As the heat has arrived consistently now, this is the last week that we'll be growing sprouts for our CSA boxes. Please do pick up your boxes as soon as possible after our truck delivers so that your produce remains fresh. Hydrocooling is helpful if you've arrived late to discover wilted greens: dunk in a sink full of chilled water, shake and refrigerate. This is what restaurants do to insure crisp greens and works just as well in a home kitchen. We're at the tail end of our avo season, still plenty of fruit out there, but some of the skins are now not sporting cosmetic perfection. The trade-off is that a summer Southern Cal Hass has wonderfully ...

We had hoped that we'd get one more week out of the mulberry grove, but the sudden hot spell  vanquished all hope there. All the berries fell off on Sunday and the local bird/rabbit/squirrel population are having a berry fest field day. Best mulberries ever, this was a good season for us, as many years we've only gotten a week or two out of the grove. Next year, it will be even better as we learned a thing or two about mulberry management. We also discovered that rattlesnakes like to hang out in that part of the farm, and so next year us harvesters will be "chapped up" with rattlesnake protection, at least in the early weeks of picking when the snakes have gotten accustomed to having the grove to themselves. Below is this week's large Garden N Grove box The Spring Mix sprouts are these sprouted seeds: Broccoli Radish Red Clover Alfalfa

Here's the image for yesterday and today's harvest. The blood oranges have colored up nicely with the help of January's frosts. This doesn't happen every year for us, so it's always gratifying to see how amazingly red our Moro's become when Mother Nature cooperates.

CSA Box, December 29/30, 2014 Darn cold out here this week, unlike the last two Decembers; this feels like winter. Neighboring Temecula got down into the high 20's last night I hear, and although warmer in Rainbow, it's still lingering close to freezing temperatures at night here; which may mean tree injuries. On the bright side, our deciduous fruit trees require SOME chill, and for two years we've had almost no plums. We should be getting a bumper crop this year.

Today's box is slightly different than yesterday's box because the Protein Crunchy Bean Mix wasn't ready yesterday. We'll move production back a day now that the nights are colder; so hopefully next week we won't have this disappointment. Lot's of mandarins now for a while! The leafy green in the center of the photo is Italian parsley. Super easy to grow, and a lot less strong tasting compared to the curly parsley varieties.

Nothing unusual here that would need identification. First week in December is late for our first Satsuma mandarin harvest. Plenty of limes for a while! The image here has only one beet, plenty more in actual boxes. And the long onion looking thing is a leek. I chopped mine up and used in a stir fry...using mostly only the root end and all of the white part of the plant. The top part is too tough.

A typical fall CSA box. You'll also find something new from our sprout production facility. This is the first trial week, so if you have comments or thoughts about our newest addition to our sprout offerings: Protein Sprout Crunch. It's a tasty combination of lentils, spreckled peas, and green peas. A few boxes will see our sunflower shoots, but we haven't perfected the growth cycle to get the shoots to reach maturity on the CSA days. We're either too early or too late. We'll get it right soon!

Eggplant at last! We're growing two kinds here this year: the striped one in the image is Gandia, and the solid purple ones without stripes are Black Beauty. This week all peppers in the boxes are sweet, next week we'll have our hot peppers.

Sweet Pepper We've included Purslane in this week's boxes, note the tasty, tiny black seeds are NOT bugs. Two kinds of peppers, the long, bigger peppers are sweet, and the jalapanos are, of course, hot. If you're new to the Reed Avocado, it ripens a little bit differently than your typical grocery store Hass avocado. It's still taking around a week after harvest to be ready to eat, but because as the fruit ripens the flesh contracts slightly, you might squeeze the fruit and think it's gone bad. That "squish" isn't fruit, it's airspace. I love the Reeds, I think they have the nuttiest, smoothest flavor of all the different varieties we grow. They're not favored by grocery store chains because of their size and weird ripening characteristic. Jalapanos

The summer has been kind to us, as the genuine heat wave typical of inland San Diego has not arrived, and we're almost in August! Where did the summer go? We're excited to share a new item we've been experimenting with, our Sunflower Shoots. We included them in all but two (:/) Large Garden N Grove boxes. (We made up for that unusual slight by substituting other items; something we rarely have to do.) We're still working on getting the timing and yields down. The other clamshelled item is our Purslane, which is among my favorite warm weather veggies. It has a lemony flavor with a very low-cal, satisfying crunch. I add it to salads, sandwiches and offer it up all by itself with a dip. It's a great green to add to a rice paper roll up. I enjoy the stems as well as the leaves. We actually harvested two bunches of Swiss chard for Large Boxes, and one bunch for Small boxes, but ended up with only one bunch in each box because we couldn't get the Large Box lids cl...