Summer 2026 Week 20 Newsletter
Howdy Folks,
We have two new canned items available with our produce being the main ingredients in them, Pepper Spread and Medium Salsa! We have been working with Stello Foods, a specialty food manufacturer in Punxsutawney, PA about 21 miles from the farm. They have been helping us to make our Tomato Soup all these years, since 2017. Now we are trying a couple new things. Necessity is the “mother of invention” in this case we had too much at once of peppers and thus Pepper Spread, and Salsa, well too many tomatoes, & then we had all the other ingredients, so why not make Salsa! They are all quite tasty! We opted to not have preservatives in the pepper spread, so once you pop the top, you will want to use it in up to 3 days. It’s not spicy. We used sweet Red Carmen peppers. It’s great lathered on toast, thrown into a roast, combined with pull pork, makes a great base for an enchilada sauce, you can add it to marinara sauce, you name it, it’s versatile. When I brought home the salsa we poured it on top of our dinner and it made the dinner taste better, then it’s always good to have a jar in the cupboard for an easy quick snack right out of the jar with some tortilla chips to quench insatiable family members.
It’s been a busy week. The milkweeds are starting to set their seeds free, its the time of their expulsion, as the pods burst open pods to free their heirs to the wind, but somehow they cling, linger and clump together. Sometimes, if the rains come too soon after this bursting, they will remain in a clump on the half open pod all winter. Their gossamer parachutes are mesmerizing, just as special as the dandelions, but not nearly as prolific!
We’ve had a bunch of big machines here getting the land that got dug and piled from our building expansions all leveled out, so it doesn’t look so crazy around here with so many 10’ high piles of dirt all over the place, growing tall and healthy patches of weeds. It actually looks so civilized right now, so clean cut and combed. And not so civilized, Chris and Andres swung like monkeys from the hoophouse bows putting up irrigation to irrigate hoophouse 10 that went through renovations this week. At the beginning of the week it was full of 5 beds of peppers; 500’ x 30’! These all got harvested, 2000 lbs of the green peppers got packed up and sent off to the foodbank, and we will sell the rest this weekend and next week. Green Peppers make great stuffed peppers, a little tart with their summer flare stuffed with whatever suits your fancy! We made stuffed peppers this week! I think my favorite part is making more than you need and having awesome leftovers. The next time we make them we are going to make way too much and freeze a bunch!
Your Farmers,
Chris, Aeros and the Who Crew
Hoophouse 10 full of peppers at the beginning of the week.
Hoophouse 10 at the end of the week, all cleaned up from peppers and pepper debris, tilled and seeded with spinach, radish, arugula, and spring mix. I'm sorry I'm missing the pictures of the fun and sweaty guys busting to make these changes happened. It's crazy. I'm in the office and the guys make stuff happen so quickly it kills me to not document the chaos and fun of it all.
Milkweed seed expolsion!
The replaced to contour, combed and seeded ground at the back of the house. This is way too much for us to mow, so we are excited to expand the house gardens!!!