This weeks CSA box and garden update.

Our CSA box is now bringing us tomatoes each week!  Woo hoo!  Of course the kids end up eating them like apples the minute they're ripe enough, but I'm not complaining.  If you look closely you'll see a container of blueberries that was half eaten before we took the picture...we made blueberry pancakes for dinner that night, and even the two year old ate them, which is a feat since 90% of his diet is peanut better and jelly sandwiches.

Our amazing Kretschmann Farm CSA box this week.

The lady bugs on the eggplant...hopefully they'll go eat that flea beetle.

I have a few tomatillo flowers on each plant, so we should have purple and green tomatillos soon!

The broccoli is setting out side shoots, though I can't imagine them getting very large in this ridiculous heat.  

The mystery melon is getting larger.

A baby watermelon starting.

These volunteers look nothing like any of the tomatoes I've ever grown or bought.  They're probably some hybrid of a roma.

Those two had blossom end rot so I picked them.  Look how weirdly long and skinny!

I though I saw squash vine borer fracas there, but now I'm not sure.  The plant is definitely sick but it seems to be more of a leaf issue.

That is another volunteer that is an obvious hybrid of last years Black Prince and some other tomato.

Sweet Mother of God.  I should have pulled these all last week...look at all the powdery mildew.   This is the worst case of it I've ever seen, and it's bizarre because the weather has been super hot.

My black beauty eggplant was looking very sick so I picked the two little eggplants  pretty small.  

Garden bugs, missing apples and our Kretschmann Farm CSA box!

Our back yard has 2 large old apple trees that produce a TON of apples each fall.  One is a yellow/green, and the other is some type of red.  This year the trees didn't bloom...or if they did I missed it.  There are some pretty cruddy looking leaves on the trees right now, along with a complete absence of baby apples.  I have no idea what happened, but it's very disappointing.

This is the largest tree and would normally be FULL of apples.

Maybe it has something to do with the leaves being all spotty?

The smaller apple tree is behind the boy...it too has no apples at all forming and several bright yellow diseased leaves.

Pinky cares nothing for apples so her sympathy is lacking.

I don't know how Kretschmann stacks up to other Pittsburgh CSAs, but we're some happy campers!

This little guy (or girl I mean) lived in the border around my beet bed. 

Don't know what type of caterpillar this is, but it sure is fuzzy.

CSA box Five

I skipped a few weeks of posting CSA pictures because my kids dug into it so fast that I forgot to TAKE pictures!  Here's week five of our Kretschmann Farm CSA:

2 x Zucchini
4 x beets
2 x cucumbers
a bunch of kale
a bag of broccoli
a bag of herbs
a bag of squash blossoms
several bags of greens and lettuces

Our broccoli is finally setting heads!  This is the first year they've made it this far.  

Our Sweet 100 tomato is filling up with tiny green fruit.

This is a volunteer growing along a wall and I'm not sure what it's going to be.  Last year we only had Mr. Stripey, Better Boy, Roma, and Black Prince, so I'm thinking this is a hybrid of one of the round types and the Mr. Stripey.  I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

This volunteer looks like a straight Black Prince to me.

Okra flower?  I had no idea what this plant looked like before growing it, so I'm a bit surprised by the gigantic flower.

Ichiban Eggplant with flea beetle-eaten leaves.

This is a volunteer run wild.  I will clean it up and cage it tomorrow.  Looks like grape or pear tomato  to me.  LOADS of blooms.

Food everywhere!

We're reaching the part of garden season where the kids start to REALLY get excited.  Harvesting is much less work and much more fun than all the stuff that comes earlier in the season.  We're also getting more variety with our CSA, which is awesome because it forces us to try and figure out how new and creative ways to cook food that the kids will eat.

One of the big success stories in this arena, is actually my first attempt at quiche.  After being inspired by this post and recipe by Chris over at Adventures of a Thrifty Mama I decided to give it a try using ham, broccoli, garlic scapes, fresh basil, and spring onions all from the amazing Kretschmann Farm CSA.  It was surprisingly awesome, and even better than the quiche I remember eating all the time when I worked at Whole Foods several years ago.

I tied up the volunteer tomatoes growing behind the bush beans.  The peas have been yanked and more beans have been planted on each side of the tomatoes.

An entire melon cluster has been eaten by bunnies.  They were spaced too close anyway, so it's not a huge loss, but this is a trend I would like to stop.

Austin picked one of his "spicy peppers" (Garden Salsa).  Not sure what we'll do with it yet since we have no tomatoes.  

Today's harvest was one weirdly shaped Space Miser Zucchini, two immature gypsy bell peppers, one garden salsa pepper, and one small kohlrabi.

Lemonbalm, Flea Beetles and CSA box #2! Woo hoo!

So I found out that the weird citronella smelling plant along my back fence is actually lemon balm.  I've never had lemon balm before, but I found out you can make lemon balm pesto and a bunch of other neat and yummy things, so I guess we'll be trying out some new recipes.

Lemon balm also repels insects, which might be why they are all living on my potted plants along that fence.  Now that the aphids have been destroyed (along with my original eggplant and cherry tomato plants) and I have replanted with seedlings bought from the most excellent Garden Dreams Urban Farm & Nursery, my poor replacement eggplant leaves are being made into swiss cheese by flea beetles.  Ugh.  I bought some neem oil spray so tomorrow we should be able to test it.

 The Space Miser has new blooms daily!

Our Kretschmann Farms CSA box had fresh strawberries, herbs, radishes, garlic scapes, kale and lots of different lettuces.

The kids were most excited about the new lettuce.  They're pretty used to the bland tasteless iceberg that we buy, so this was a very flavorful treat.

A view of the whole box.

FIRST CSA! WOOHOO!

Today we picked up our first box from our Kretschmann Farm CSA subscription. Being early in the season (and because they got a late start due to the rain) it was mostly greens and rhubarb, but hey that's cool with us! They also included some extra goodies to make up for it:

The big bag on the left is mixed greens including pea shoots (which the kids really like). There is also a bunch of fresh basil, rosemary and thyme. The white bag is full of organic mushrooms, the stalks are rhubarb, and the bread is 7 grain from Friendship Farms in the Laurel Highlands. The little-kid-hands were not included in the box.

mmmmmmm....mushrooms

This bread would have been great with a soup, but it didn't last long enough once it got here.

Butter with fresh chopped herbs on 7 grain bread.

Our first CSA dinner. The Friendship Farms bread with fresh herb butter and mixed greens in a dressing made with herbs, lime, and olive oil. We also added chicken and sliced mushrooms. It was gooooooooooooood.....

After dinner I ended up finding some amazing plant deals while trying to find replacements for the eggplant and tomatoes I killed the other day. I found a dwarf Moonglow pear tree, a semi-dwarf Ayers pear tree, and a white heirloom eggplant and green-with-white-stripes eggplant along with melon seeds to direct seen once the bed is finished in the next day or so. Hopefully I can get some pictures up tomorrow.