Can't You Grow Anything Normal?

Yellow beets, red carrots, green tomatoes, purple basil... one would think that we were color challenged considering some of the vegetable varieties we tend to favor at the Genuine Faux Farm.  But, since we are taking our CSA members along for the ride, we felt they might like to have a little bit more information.

Favorite Varieties
If you have been reading for a while - or if you have been a customer of ours - you realize that we grow a wide range of vegetables.  And, within that range of vegetable types, we have a number of varieties.  For example, we grow approximately 30 different tomato varieties every season.  We even grow four types of peas and four types of green beans. 

In any event, if you want to dive into this a bit more than this post, we recommend visiting our Veg Variety page on our web site.  This page includes links back to our blog that show our veg variety winners since 2007.

Basil
As a lead up to Elizabeth's Culinary Corner blog post that is coming up this Sunday, we present you with some basil.

Treat basil like a bouquet

For all of you folks out there who aren't sure how to store basil, we present exhibit A.  We take basil we've cut and put it in a vase.  This picture was taken ten days after the basil was cut.  It lasted well enough for another two or three days.  It smells nice, looks pretty good AND you can rub a leaf and get a whiff of basil if you like the smell.

Peppers
We are starting to see some of our pepper varieties produce and we hope they will continue to produce until October.  Our Thursday share holders were treated to peppers that were not the usual bell peppers.  We have a page on our website that gives descriptions for some of our sweet pepper varieties.  The spicy peppers can be found on another page.  On Thursday, we included options to try Jimmy Nardello's Frying Pepper, Alma Paprika and Tolli Sweet.  None of these peppers are "hot" peppers.  While Jimmy looks like a hot pepper, it is actually an excellent sweet pepper that sweetens up even more when cooked.  Try one on a pizza!  The Tolli Sweet has a wonderful, mild taste that is great for raw eating.  The paprika pepper will taste of, well, paprika - this should not be a surprise.
 

Don't let them fool you, these are a sweet pepper!

 We like our bell peppers as well, of course.  But, as is often the case, each variety has a distinct taste and texture.  If one doesn't make you happy, maybe the next one will!

Beets
We've had a couple of people wonder why we let the red out of our beets and then put it on our carrots.   We grow Dragon carrots that have a red skin and orange interior.  And, then we also grow Touchstone Gold beets.  You can see the color of the skin below.  Definitely not the deep, dark red of most beets.  The interior is, in fact, a beautiful golden color.

Golden Beets

One advantage we see with the golden beets or the Chioggia beets (red and white rings in the interior) is that they don't 'bleed' all over everything.  While the red coloring doesn't hurt anything, some people have a hard time getting past it.  Others find the red beet 'side effects' somewhat alarming as well. 

We have found that the Touchstone Gold beets like the high tunnel and grew very well for us out there.  The taste is outstanding.  We've successfully roasted the beets and grilled them in a tin foil packet thus far.  Just a little bit of real butter on them and viola!

Taters, precious.

Mountain Rose, Rio Grande and Purple Majesty

And then, there are potatoes.  We grow one white Russet type called Canela.  Sadly, Rio Grande is no longer available to us.  We grow two yellow varieties - Carola and German Butterball.  And then, we grow the red potato (Mountain Rose) and the purple potato (Purple Majesty).  Yes, one is red/pink on the inside and the other is blue/purple on the inside.  Taste is fabulous and they are particularly good fried in rounds.  Tammy and I like them both baked and are ok if they are mashed - you just have to get around the color issue again.  Purple potatoes and golden beets in a foil packet on the grill.  Add some hot melted butter.....  I'm hungry.

This is a just a sampling of the variety that we are proud to grow on our farm.  Stay tuned and we'll feature more varieties in the future.  Or, you can check out the Just Veg-ing Out label for more blog posts.  And, you can spin through our veg variety pages on the website.  Enjoy!