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This week’s fruit:
Brooks Cherries
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
Brooks Cherries are the total package. Beautiful deep red color, perfect tart/sweet balance & great texture!
Rainier Cherries
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
A well-known variety, the Rainier is the only white cherry we grow! Plump, delicious and with an extremely sweet creamy flesh, they’re best eaten out of hand. Their distinctive flavor lends for a unique eating experience.
Fuji Apples
Cuyama, New Cuyama, CA
Fujis are a cross between Red Delicious and Ralls Janet, an heirloom apple dating back to Thomas Jefferson. They are one of the sweetest variety apples around making them a household favorite.
Hass Avocados
Bravacado, San Diego, CA
Creamy in texture, nutty in flavor, with a small to medium seed. The Hass skin is easy to peel and darkens from green to purplish-black as it ripens.
Pixie Mandarins
Churchill Orchards, Ojai, CA
Pixie tangerines are a late season variety that begin ripening in March and April. Their tough skin gives way to fruit with a very robust flavor.
The Pixie .
Sweet Anne Strawberries
JW Farm, Watsonville, CA
The Sweet Ann is a fairly new variety, created in 2005 to grow in the coastal climates like Santa Cruz County. Sweet Anns are usually big, conically-shaped berries with excellent sweet old fashioned strawberry flavor and a semi firm flesh.
Note from Farmer Al
Dear CSA Member,
Summer heat is here! It’ll be 98F today we’re loving the heat. It ripens the fruit nicely and brings an intensity to everything we do in the fields.
Today we’ll be picking the last of our Brooks cherries. The ones we have left on the tree are now fullyripe and must be removed from the tree or they’ll shrivel on the branch. And the Rainier cherries are now ready for the first pick. You’ll get them today along with the last of the Brooks. Your children and you will be enjoying a cherry bonanza this week!
Yesterday my family and friends were here to celebrate my birthday and everyone wanted to pick cherries. After the initial feeding frenzy, my niece Emily, who works the Berkeley Farmer’s market on Saturday remarked that customers at the farmer’s market would taste our cherries first, then shop around looking for a better price (ours sell for $10/lb) only to return later to buy our more expensive cherries… “Your cherries are much sweeter,” they explained!
So to test this proposition, we visited a neighboring cherry orchard to do our own ‘taste comparison’ and sure enough, our cherries were much sweeter, even though the neighbor’s cherries were grown in similar soil and climate. The reason has everything to do with how we treat our soil.
So enjoy the delicious fruit,
Farmer Al
