Wild Hare Weekly, Summer #10/18: Tomatoes, Peaches, Beets & MORE

Aug 4

Popping cherry tomatoes, slicing up cool cucumbers, and enjoying sweet stone fruit—it doesn’t get much more divine (or physically demanding) than the late Summer harvests of August. The crew picked several flats of tomatoes today as a load of lovely Peaches arrived from Okanogan. The Peaches are freshly picked and still firm, but the sugar is there. A few days on the counter at room temp should do the trick—but you can experiment with bagging and other techniques if you’re trying to expedite the process.

We’ll start picking our next rotation of Red Beets tomorrow, so it is as great a week as any to make a refrigerator pickle or two. My Mom has a straightforward and delicious method for making a batch of quick sweet refrigerator pickles. She cuts up Cucumbers, Beets and Onions into thin slices, packs them into a jar of her choosing. Then she boils up a quick brine made of a 1:1 sugar to white distilled vinegar for five minutes before pouring it into the jar of chopped vegetables (making enough liquid to submerge them). After it cools a bit, she pops it into the fridge for storage, and uses her quick pickles as snacks, salad ingredients and sandwich toppings. Easy peasy!

This is the kind of week that we look forward to all year, and we’ve got even more good stuff on deck as we move through August. The Zucchini and Summer Squash may be pumping their brakes a little, but the Tomatoes are ramping up and we’ll be picking Sweet Corn, Celery, Romano Beans, and Peppers in the matter of just a few weeks.

Enjoy,
Katie