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THIS WEEK’S FRUIT
Warren Pears
The Warren is to our pears as the Cal Red is to our peaches. This is Frog Hollow Farm’s signature pear and for good reason. Too difficult to grow for most farmers to consider it’s never caught on commercially but Farmer Al has never shied away from putting the time and effort into a fruit that tastes so good. It has a classic European texture, very soft and juicy with a silky sweetness that avoids the typical grittiness found in most pears.
Hosui Asain Pears
Hosui have 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.
Emerald Beaut Plum
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.
Dapple Dandy Pluot
Playfully called the “dinosaur egg” pluot, the Dapple Dandy has marbled pink and green skin over delicate white flesh threaded with rose. Kids especially love this pluot for its distinctive coloration and the lack of tartness in the skin.
Flavor Heart Pluot
The Flavor Heart gets its name from its distinctively tapered shape. Its meaty, pale yellow flesh is very low in acid and the sweetness and color contrasts strikingly with its dark purple almost black skin.
Lamb Hass Avocado
Abounding Harvest Mountain Farm, Los Gatos CA
Lamb-Hass is a cross between the traditional Hass and a Gwen (Dwarf ) Avocado. A late season avocado with a rich and nutty flavor.
**Varieties subject to change**
A NOTE FROM FARMER AL
Dear CSA Members,
It was a warm and balmy day in San Francisco…could have been Acapulco, 800 and humid. There were lots of regulars raving about the fruit, but also bemoaning the end of Cal Reds. But no matter, they were still happy to have the Summersets and the Autumn Flames.
So I was really enjoying the day until this one customer came. He was young, tall, lean and very blonde, and was holding his small child. What he did was a perfect example of how wasteful and wrong our food system is here in the good ol’ US of A.
He proceeded to pick over at least 15 of the most beautiful Summerset peaches I’ve ever grown. He picked up one peach at a time, squeezed it, smelled it, examined it, then put it back into the display and grabbed another one and repeated the process. As I stood there in front of my scale I witnessed him repeat this ritual a dozen more times before he abandoned that display and went on to yet another of a different variety, the Autumn Flames. He did it there again, finally selecting three or four of them plus a couple of Emerald Beauts, and then he brought them up to the scale to weigh and pay. When I told him how much it was, he said, “Oh, that’s too much.” And walked off. I was angered and amazed by his behavior.
But actually, I see this fussy selecting of fruit all the time at the farmers’ markets so I’m kind of used to it. It is one of the many reasons our food system in the US is all wrong: since consumers are allowed to handle fruits and vegetables in this manner, retailers will buy only products that are durable enough to withstand the rough handling. Even so, at the end of the day this type of behavior results in a very high percentage of product that cannot be sold, and so it is thrown away. Meanwhile, back on the farm, we farmers are trained to pick everything “before it’s time” knowing that otherwise retail buyers will not buy it. So in the end we all lose, because we pay higher cost for food that is less satisfying and less nutritious that creates more waste to send to land-fills.
You have allowed us to choose fruit for you, sticking with us even when it is not always to your liking. We appreciate that you, as CSA members, understand the real value of food and reject that system.
