Labor Day snuck right up on us this year, didn’t it? Shout out to Farmer Mia and Farmer Kelly who arrived at the farm today to find hundreds of pounds of ripe and ready tomatoes waiting to be picked this morning. We were scrambling to find enough trays to hold them! Those ninety-ish degree days last week sped up their ripening big time. It also up a whole lot of Romano Beans and is blurring the timelines between our intended rotations of crops like sweet corn and varieties cabbage. In short—this is one big harvest week, which makes this a great time to consider squirreling a few tomatoes away in the freezer to pull out for a pot of sauce or soup when the cold and drear set in.

What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

For the past few years, those lines of poetry have popped into my head in August. They’re from the fifth stanza of The Garden by Andrew Marvell, and to this day I can hear the voice of my professor, the late Dr. Greg Goekjian reciting them from memory at the front of a lecture hall in the dead of winter more than 20 years ago.

Well, when it rains, it pours. In addition to loads of lovely tomatoes flowing in from our fields, we’re picking our first round of Wild Hare Organic Sweet Corn in the morning! Mark and I stood out in the field at 7am, shucked an ear a piece and gave it a taste test. The kernels were sweet enough to enjoy raw on the cob, right there for breakfast. And the Romano Beans are ready too! As a primer, Romanos are bigger than your standard green bean, but they're still plenty tender and in my opinion, this makes them more versatile. They’re a lot like a green bean or wax bean—they just look like someone ran them over with a steamroller. Just pop off the stem ends and prepare them as you would any other green bean.  You can chop them down to your preferable size or leave them whole. If you're not ready to eat your share of them this week, they can be frozen or pickled to enjoy later on.  My absolute favorite way to enjoy Romano Beans is stewed/braised with tomatoes and garlic, (like the comfort of a green bean casserole without the casserole). My recipe and method, inspired by an old Fine Cooking recipe is posted below, so scroll on down.