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This Week’s Fruit

Summerset Peaches

The Summerset matures into a very large peach, some weighing in at more than two pounds! Bright yellow with hardly no blush to speak of, the Summer- set is a freestone that boasts a bold flesh that has a strong peach flavor. Sweet and juicy but with a tart, acidic bite, it makes for a nice contrast as a follow-up to the extremely sweet Cal Red. The Summerset has a nicely firm texture that freezes well and is a favorite of ours to bake with.

Emerald Beaut Plums

A freestone plum, the Emerald Beaut is a delicate green that turns golden with a hint of a blush. It has a firmer texture than the Santa Rosa with a crisp almost crunchy mouthfeel. One of our most hardy fruit, the Emerald Beaut just gets sweeter and sweeter without losing texture as it ages. Emerald Beauts are available mid to late September.

Hosui Asian Pears

The Hosui is popular in both Japan and in California. They have a rougher, thicker skin than other Asian pears with flesh that while still crunchy has a more melting mouthful, making the texture combination when eaten out of hand spectacular. Very juicy and sweet with a milder pear taste, their round shape and beautiful golden hue make them ideal for presentation with a distinctively Autumnal feel.

Flame Seedless Grapes

Firm, large, and sweet the Flame Seedless are one of the most popular varieties in North America. Enjoy these out of hand or try them in green salads, chicken salads, or fruit salads.

Storage Recommendations

During the summer season, we recommend keeping two – three days worth of fruit out on the counter top and storing the rest in the fridge to be enjoyed later in the week.

A Note From Farmer Al

Dear CSA Members,

Two weeks ago I was introduced to the newest member of our arsenal/team of beneficial insects we use to control pests. The “aphytis” parasitoids are tiny bright yellow wasps. They arrived from an insectary via UPS, in containers of clear plastic, 1⁄2 pint in volume, each containing a phenomenal 30,000 wasps. They resemble pollen but with rapid movement. I opened one container to look inside more closely and was almost instantly stung in my eye by one of those aggressive little wasps. (So, I then read the instructions which warned that they could sting, and to protect the eyes!) Greg Young, our entomologist consultant, and I took the little guys out to the orchard for release.

We chose the Pink Lady apple orchard, the same one where we had last years’ CSA u-pick apple event. We also released some of the wasps in the Emerald Beaut Plum orchards. We chose these two orchards because they still had fruit on the trees, and because these two varieties of fruit have historically sustained considerable damage from the dreaded San Jose Scale. Scale are tiny insects with a tough, protective shell resembling scales of a fish. They cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to crops worldwide by sucking fluids from the plants with their tiny mouth parts. On fruit with smooth green skins (like Pink Lady apples and Emerald Beaut Plums) this sucking action produces a bright red spot on the skin of the fruit, which is cosmetically unacceptable in most retail stores. But the really significant damage done by scales is to the growth of the plant. Severe infestations can kill whole branches and even kill whole trees if left uncontrolled. Though tiny, they have power in numbers, and must be controlled or severe losses will occur.

Biological control is our number 1 choice to control pests here at Fog Hollow Farm. Every living species (except us humans who are at the top of the food chain) have their predators, who feed or otherwise depend on them for survival. The aphytis wasp is one of the species who depend on the Scales for their life cycle. The female wasp finds the scale and attacks

it by puncturing the tough scale shell with her stinger and then sucking out the fluid. She will oviposit an egg into the body of the scale. The wasp egg incubates inside the scale body for several days then hatches and feeds on the body of the scale for a few more days, finally emerging as an adult wasp, all in less than 2 weeks. Each wasp will lay about 200 eggs into 200 different scales. And in my hand, I held 30,000 of these lethal little creatures. You do the math…that’s a lot of dead scales. Greg and I walked through the orchards with opened 1/2 pint containers; gently tapping out bunches of these tiny yellow predators into the trees as we walked.

Next year we plan to release the aphytis much earlier, in the Spring. With maybe 10 generations possible through the growing season, at 30,000 per acre released initially, the numbers are staggering! Those San Jose Scales don’t stand a chance! You can view this incredible story online at the University of California presentation: http://stream.ucanr. org/biocontrol_final/index.htm.