Week 10

Please note the subtle farm humor...

My stop was and is the only one to get fennel. The 25 or so bulbs were the sole survivors of the planting.

What did you get this week?

Tomatoes: Squeeze them and incur my wrath!

Don't squeeze me!

Seriously. Excerpt from the newsletter:
Full article and more stories from the farm here:
www.bullrunfarm.com/newsletters.html

“Fresh, picked that morning ,tomatoes are different. They are full of water. Juice. The fruit walls are tender.If they are given a squeeze, they go squish. As in, tomato juice. And if you put them in a box and shipped them half way around the world what would come out at the other end is tomato juice, not tomatoes.

“This lesson took me a number of years to learn.

“Every year I would just put out our tomatoes like I do the rest of the vegetables, and let people pick their own.

“Each day, as I drove home, 20-25% of the tomatoes I had picked in the morning, would be sitting in the back of the truck, all squished up.

“I thought, at the time, this was just the price of doing business. ‘Tomatoes’, I thought. ‘just don’t travel well. You need to pick more to account for the short shelf life.’

“Then, one year, because we were having a poor crop of tomatoes, instead of just putting the tomatoes out for people to pick themselves, I gave the tomatoes out.

“And I learned something.

“Only 1 or 2% of the tomatoes got squished in transit.

“I found out that what was damaging all of those perfectly good tomatoes was people picking them up, giving them a little squeeze, just like they would do to a corporate tomato in the grocery store.

“But, unlike the corporate tomato, ours would go squish.

“Local, homegrown tomatoes, are a completely different creature than those corporate vegetables. They are full of juice. They can’t handle being squeezed.

“Oh well.

“So, to make the story short, when you are picking out your tomatoes, just look at them, only touch the tomatoes you are going to put in your bag. And if, by chance, you don’t particularly like that tomato after picking it up, put it in your bag anyway, and get another one.”

What did you get this week?