August 12, 2024
Making a Good Peach
by Jack Kittredge

As Julie and I were taking our Saturday trip to the dump and stopped to get lemons and cream in town, I couldn’t help but notice the above sign in the local grocery window.

I had been feeling pretty good about the amazing amount of berries, apples and peaches we were blessed with this year. Of all those, peaches are my favorite. One of the main reasons I was attracted to the idea of having a farm was so we could eat good peaches. We have close to a dozen trees producing them this year, and have been eating, drying, and freezing them as well as giving them out as part of the farm’s CSA share.

As fate would have it, Julie had just told me about the first complaint we had gotten about those CSA peaches being “rotten” just before I saw the sign. I figured it was time to take pen in hand to defend our fruit.

Conventionally raised peaches have two big problems to surmount. The first is pest and fungal attack. The second is transport to market.

To deal with pests and fungi most growers heavily dowse peaches with pesticides. According to the Environmental Working Group as many as 19 different toxins are used, and some peach samples show residues of all 19! These compounds penetrate the thin peach skins and cannot be effectively washed off. Accordingly peaches as listed (as number five!) on the EWG’s list of the dirtiest dozen foods.
Conventional transport is dealt with by picking peaches when they are hard, days before they will be sold. They are also refrigerated during interstate transport and on display for sale. Peaches, like tomatoes and bananas, are “climacteric” fruit and thus can continue to ripen once picked, as opposed to things like citrus, pineapple and cherries. But that maturation is disrupted by refrigeration and once returned to room temperature when they soften they are “mealy” or fibrous.

Thus, it is practically impossible to get a safe and good tasting peach at a grocery store. Ours, however, are organic and thus pesticide-free, and picked the morning of the day you get it. We therefore try to pick ones which are almost ripe and will be fully ripe and delicious later that day.

Most CSAs don’t give out peaches because they are difficult for these reasons. Many of our peaches have small imperfections caused by bugs. If one of these seems to us to affect the fruit’s quality we won’t give it out but keep it, cut out the imperfection, and freeze the rest for pies and cobblers. Occasionally we can certainly make a mistake, or the peaches can get held over a day or treated roughly during delivery or pick-up. If they appear ‘rotten’ we are sorry. We would like your joy at eating our peaches to be as great as ours and will try to do a better job. But let us know how you like them.

Special Gratitude this week

I want to acknowledge the more than 60 members of the Quabbin Community Band with whom I have spent much time making music for the past 3 ½ months. This band that hosts young teens all the way through to people older than I am, is an expression of community in its full essence, in my opinion. Our 9-week concert series was over as of last night, and this year we had record numbers of attendees (and band members) in large part due to our now three-year conductor, Margaret Reidy. It is a great blessing to be part of such a positive and inspirational community of very disparate folks. Though I won’t miss the late nights, (music performance does not intersect conveniently with farming schedules), I will miss my band friends, some of whom I have known for 42 years.

Great podcast from Ari Whitten

Work With Your Hormones To Optimize Your Potential | Dr. Stephanie Estima
https://theenergyblueprint.com/optimize-female-potential-stephanie-estima/?inf_contact_key=6655a1e040aeb9b821087c7954509ba96303c23d34f0b6ec81d0174425c11f9a
I wish I had known about Stephanie’s work back when I was menstruating. Information packed!

What is in your CSA Share this week?

Share week of August 5

Best guess for week of August 12

Basil
Tulsi
Squash – the squash is going down hill a bit earlier than in the past two years, but we will have some, and also are hoping that a new planting in the pond field garden will start producing in a few weeks
Cucumbers – still going strong although cucumbers are often a trial for us
Lettuce – now a new succession from the garden
Cilantro
Dill
Chard
Kale
Pepper – these are very healthy plants this year
Green beans – larges last week – we will go with mediums this week
Tomatoes – I forgot to even look for these on Monday, and by Friday they were in good supply
Peaches

Beets
Broccoli or cabbage
flowers for flower shares

We are still taking new shareholders – here is where you can sign up — https://mhof.net/csa-order-form/

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Singing Opportunity

Circle of Song, a Barre and regionally based choral group of which I am the director, will be starting up soon on Thursday, September 12 at 7:00 pm at the Barre Town Hall. We are starting our 23^rd season and are planning on doing a relatively new major work titled Requiem for the Living, by Dan Forest. You can listen to it here – https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-infospace-076&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-076&hspart=infospace&p=Requiem+for+the+LIving+satb+youtube&type=ud-c-us–s-p-tfzzhiwm–exp-none–subid-fk6j226i#id=1&vid=eb203b45427da4763f59ec91901a9b81&action=click If you can carry a tune, we can help you with the rest. We will be also doing some dancing, under the guidance of member Grace Jenkins and some conducting by our pianist Cailan McClure. We are a group of singers aged from early 20’s to mid-80’s, we sing in 4-part harmony, and we push ourselves just a little bit past our comfort zones musically. As you might imagine, if you know me and Jack, we have no pretenses (sometimes choral groups can be accused of putting on airs) and we are super friendly and supportive. This might be the fall that you make a bunch of new friends and work together to co-create a wonderful piece of art work. The concert will be held on Saturday, December 14 at the Barre Town Hall. Rehearsals, starting September 12, are every Thursday (except Thanksgiving) at the Town Hall from 7:00 – 8:30 pm. Contact me if you would like to join (sliding scale – $40-$70/year to cover music costs and our pianist’s salary). julie@mhof.net; 978-257-1192.

Order your Meat Birds Today

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Volunteering at MHOF

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday – 8-12, or 7:30 if you want breakfast. Saturday mornings we host volunteers from 7 sharp until 9:30 – breakfast included.
New volunteers this week on Saturday were Matt and Marcello. Matt is a second-generation Chinese/Filipino and Marcello is Brazilian. I learned a particularly interesting amount from Marcello about the waves of immigration into Brazil over the centuries. And then Jack found this great video for me regarding German immigration there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxntgmVgJ0Q

We are so lucky here to have the world arrive at our doorstep.

Jennifer’s recipe for the week

Cinnamon Ginger Peach Jelly

I thought I would stay on the peaches theme as I have been processing many over the past couple weeks. If you are not going to use your peaches up right away, cut and freeze them to save them up for jelly. I also know that Julie and Jack will be selling frozen ones later in the season.

Peaches are high in pectin so it makes great jelly without the additives.

Ingredients:
5 cups or more of peaches, peeled, pitted and chopped
1 teaspoon Pink Himalayan Salt
1/2 cup Organic Raw Cane Sugar
1 heaping teaspoon of Cinnamon
1 lemon, juiced

Add all ingredients in a sauce pan.
Cook on medium low until most of the natural water from the peaches is evaporated.
Pour into mason jelly jars when hot and cover immediately.
Allow to cool on the counter.

Items that you can buy for your own food preservation

Starting now we will have some crops in enough abundance that you can buy them in quantity for preserving for your use in the next year. We now have kale, chard and collards at $3/lb. It is of exceptional quality, and is one of those superfoods.

Last Workshop of the Season

Food Preservation – September 14, 2024

September 14, 2024
10am – 2 pm with a pot luck lunch at noon
Price: $50 – $100 – sliding scale
Presenters: Julie Rawson, Jennifer Peck, Marissa Gabriel

We preserve hundreds of pounds of food each year enough to fill 7 freezers, 400 mason jars, a root cellar, and cupboards with dried foods. Join us at the height of the food preservation season to preserve our way through the day. We will freeze vegetables, can tomatoes and grape juice, make applesauce, start some lacto-fermented sauerkraut, dry some herbs and garlic and discuss best methods for canning freezing drying, and root cellaring. At lunch time we will share a pot luck lunch.
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