Catalpa Ridge News–Vol 21 No 8–August 2, 2016

 

We had a Great Rainy Week

 

News from the Fields & Farm:  We finally received more than a brief rain. Over 3” fell during the past week over 3 different days and boy did it really perk the plants up!

 

We started to harvest the Red Wing Onions from the field. They are now in the greenhouse on the racks curing along with some white Cipollini onions and shallots.

 

We transplanted, lettuces and escarole. The fields did become too wet to work in. The field tomatoes are in great shape and we have started harvesting. The cherry tomatoes are almost ready to harvest.

 

The fruit is behind due to the late freeze and we hope to be able to get some fruit from a local farm in the near future.

Franklin Greenhouse Report: We are still harvesting tomatoes from the greenhouse and it looks like more eggplant for the next few weeks. We should have sweet & hot peppers next week from the greenhouse. We will have to replant the Oriental Greens as it appears we have a crop loss due to it getting too hot.

 

Weather report: Rain fell a number of different days this past week. All the field crops are looking much better. This month’s rainfall has surpassed the rain in July 2015, though the temperatures were higher.

 

Fun Facts about Romaine Lettuce: from: http://www.kitchenproject.com/history/Salads_Lettuce/Romaine.htm How has Caesar Salad affected the production of Romaine Lettuce?  But for much of the 20th century, romaine wasn’t known at all to many Americans. That’s because of the overwhelming success of iceberg lettuce, which can remain reliably crunchy (though incredibly bland) despite days if not weeks of shipping. As late as the mid-1970s, iceberg lettuce accounted for more than 95 percent of all of the lettuce grown in this country.

Then along came the reborn Caesar salad. Invented in a Tijuana restaurant in the 1920s (which one is a subject of a bitter interfamilial dispute), for decades the Caesar kind of limped along in all of its garlicky glory as a California specialty.

Then, all of a sudden, in the late 1970s it was “discovered” by the fast-food industry, often topped with very untraditional grilled chicken, and there followed a couple of decades of extremely heady popularity.
From almost nothing, by the mid ’90s, more than 16,000 acres of romaine was being grown. By 2000 that had increased to more than 60,000 acres and today it stands at more than 80,000.