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Fruit of the week:
O’Henry Peaches
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
Farmer Al’s favorite peach to grill, the O’Henry has the flavor, size, and crimson blush that makes for a truly memorable peach. It’s elegantly pointed shape slices to an attractive heart shape for striking presentation.
Fantasia Nectarines
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
Quickly becoming one of our best-known and most popular varieties, the Fantasia is a large, tapered heirloom variety. It’s deep golden flesh is amazingly sweet and smooth, and its marbled bright red skin makes for exceptionally beautiful presentation. Like many of our more unique and heirloom varieties, the Fantasia is a far more fragile fruit than most farms will even consider growing. Like the Suncrest peach that often ripens at the same time, the Fantasia is easily bruised when allowed to ripen properly on the branch, but we’re sure you’ll agree that the taste is well worth the risk.
Flavor King Pluots
Frog Hollow Farm, Brentwood, CA
A dark-skinned pluot with red flesh, it has an intense rich flavor combined with sweet, spicy tones that are reminiscent of the Santa Rosa. A nice acid bite and firm texture that softens beautifully as the fruit continues to ripen, the Flavor King is amazing out of hand and equally good for baking.
News of the week:
Dear CSA members,
Our troubles with the scorching afternoon temperatures
continue to persist this week! Many of our fruit-pickers are
leaving early in the afternoon because it’s just too hot to work!
And I am left scrambling to reorganize my workforce–often
having to bring in workers from the ground team and, at times,
I have to reach out to my packing crew. When fruit is ready, we
must pick it or we will lose it to this heat.
Gatorade helps! It’s my business partner Sarah’s idea. She has
set up a program to have the kitchen team prepare a batch
of electrolyte-rich Gatorade every day with buckets of ice and
to make it available in pitchers for the field crew for their 1pm
break. We repeat the process for their second break later in
the afternoon, too! We must be creative if we want to beat the
heat! Our fruit-pickers are skilled workers and I appreciate their
commitment to getting the job done; but most importantly, we
should take care of them!
In fact, we should all be grateful to them for they know to pick
fruits at peak ripeness; they’re not harvesting every piece of
fruit on every branch. They carefully select each piece based
on the background color of the fruit. It’s no accident that our
fruit is so sweet. Several factors contribute to the legendary
taste of Frog Hollow’s fruits but none would matter if our fruit
pickers didn’t know what they’re doing!
I am grateful for the work they do!
