Morning Song Farm News

Such beautiful greens now that we're in the cooler weather! This is the first week we're harvesting our Georgia Greens. Need home delivery? We offer home delivery to many of the communities we serve (North San Diego Coastal, South Orange County, Fallbrook, Rainbow and Temecula. Just ask! To communicate questions about our beautiful, organic produce boxes here's the link we've set up specifically for our produce box customers so that communications don't get lost in our inbox: click here.  We'd love to hear from you! Want more information? Here's our website: www.morningsongfarm.com.

Here's a shot of what we plan on harvesting for our Home Delivery Farm Boxes for November 16, 2016.  (We only have a few group deliveries now, most of our members have opted for Home Delivery in communities that we offer it in.)  Fyi, this week's Hachiya persimmons need to be fully ripe! They're more like a pudding fruit than anything else. If you get impatient and try biting into one of these pretty fruits before they're ready, you won't do it again. Just awful! They're also wonderful dried, almost like candy.

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.

This week's Large Garden N Grove CSA Box. Three herbs: cilantro, small sprig of rosemary and curly parsley. And the only unusual veggie this week is our beautiful dandelions in the bottom left of the image above. The first of the zutano avocados of the season, in large shares only this week. Yep, the hiatus of avocados have come to an end. With 500+ trees, and several varieties, (mostly Hass) we have avocados in our CSA boxes 9-10 months out of the year. By the time August-September rolls around and we're out of the fruit, many of our much appreciated CSA members are telling us they're OVER guacamole.

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!

At last we're into cooler weather! We sure snuck by the usual, miserably hot 92028 summer out here until September. Then, we found ourselves working in sauna-like heat for a few weeks. Anyone who thinks they'd like to farm in rural San Diego should try September out here first before giving up their day job. :/ Here's our harvest shot for this week. We also harvested a few late eggplants that ended up in some of the trade-in boxes, so if you have an eggplant in your possession from us...it's either a Black Beauty or probably the beautiful, variegated Gandia. We do save seeds from our heirlooms, and sometimes the results are crossed the next year, so some of our eggplant this year seems to be crosses of the two main varieties we grow. There are ways to avoid cross pollination so that heirloom seeds come "true" each year...we don't bother. Be aware that the chili peppers are indeed hot. Use only a tiny bit in your stir fries, and try the rest for future ...

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

First week of our peppers, we're growing both sweets and hots. We bagged them up separately. The bags that have the very-obvious-t- identify jalapenos are all hot, and the bags of peppers that are mostly if not all...the little pumpkin shaped red peppers are sweets. First week of our Asian pears, too. Many people enjoy these like apples; crisp and hard right off the tree. Others like to let them soften on the counter for a few days. We suggest you try both!

Sprouts are back this week! All shares have our Radish Sprouts, and the Large Shares also have our Ancient Eastern Crunchy Mix. I've added a note on the radish labels about the fact that the fuzzy roots of the just-harvested radish is normal, not mold. The only REALLY unusual leafy green this week is the dandies. (See upper left of the photo above.) I enjoy them raw in salads, but they can also be lightly steamed like you would arugula. They're spicy, but not as spicy as arugula. We continue to include lots of avocados in our boxes, but we are coming to the end of 2014's harvest in the next few weeks. You'll notice your avocados take less time to ripen now that the oil content is the highest that it will get. In the beginning of the season in January...avos need at least 10 days to ripen, I think many are finding that the fruit now needs half that.