Hutchinson Farm

Last weekend of summer, and we still have lots of summer yummies!

The bountiful harvest continues, alas that will all change shortly, let’s enjoy while we can!
Thanks Marco, Ricardo, and Ricardo (Noe was out picking beans).

Of course we have green tomatoes!

It’s pick your own raspberry season again and they are beautiful!

This year we are growing five types of eggplant.
We could grow even more varieties, but I also wonder if five is too many? Maybe 5 is just right! 🤗

Saving seed for next year’s heirloom tomatoes!
I try to save seed when the tomatoes are at their best, late August - early September.

My favourite hot peppers are Poblanos…this one’s a beaut!
Need to make rajas con crema!

We’re open today, Labour Day.
Today we picked the first leeks of the season, but mostly our focus is on tomatoes. We’ve already picked a wagon of heirloom tomatoes for today, and right now we’re picking Romas which will come in from the field before lunch…expecting a good supply of 1/2 bushels.

A bountiful harvest!
Looks like we’re making zucchini relish, and something with beans.
We’re open Labour Day, btw

Beans are Back!
After a brief interlude between patches, we just started picking our next patch of green and yellow beans.
It’s hard to resist grabbing a handful!

Heirlooms 2024
I’ve missed a few, but this shows nearly every variety of tomato we are growing this season. It is a wonderful time of year, that we wish would last longer than it will and I n spite of our field flooding three times, the tomatoes are doing great!

This morning’s breakfast heirloom is Dester.
So good! Identical in taste, colour, and shape to the famous Brandywine, but with fewer cracks and blemishes.
Peak season, but not for much longer🙁

Green Zebra!
A fantastic heirloom tomato that’s very green and very delicious. These ones are ripe and ready to eat, a customer favourite.

Show me some heat!
Capsaicin is the chemical that makes chile peppers hot. Yellow in colour, you can see it in ribbing inside the pepper. The seeds which are attached to the ribbing contain just a wee bit of capsaicin, and the flesh contains none, so it tastes just like a sweet pepper.
Often we cut the ribbing off our sweet peppers, don’t do this with hot peppers if you want your hot peppers hot!

Blackberries!
We have a wonderful crop this year, they really like all the rain we’ve had over the last 2 years.
I think it’s time to make blackberry jam!

This morning I grabbed an Ananas Noire from our heirloom tomato cart for my breakfast. This green-rose bicolour is maybe my favourite heirloom tomato.

Pascal Moreau, a Belgian horticulturist, discovered Ananas Noire growing in a patch of the yellow-red bicoloured heirloom variety called ‘Pineapple’. This explains the french translation, Black Pineapple.

Get them while you can!
Although our order book is full, we do have extras every so often, like these that the guys just picked this morning.

Moon and Stars!
Just in from the field this morning are these 3 heirloom watermelon, that’s the first pick of them this year.
M & S is an heirloom variety, oodles of flavour, and of course it has seeds!

Grilling? Add sliced eggplant! We brush ours with a mixture of olive oil and soy sauce. So good!

Melon season!

Today is our first significant pick of tomatoes, woohoo!
Thanks Marco and the rest of the guys for all their hard work picking.

Tomatillos are doing great this year! Time to make salsa verde 🙂

Breakfast of Champions!
A thick slice of a Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato, fresh cut basil, a touch of mayo, on toasted cheese bread, yum yum. I do wonder what my 7 year old self would have thought! Photo was cropped so you can’t see my bites.
FYI, our phone is out (copper wire issue), Bell says repaired by Tuesday.

Tomato Update
Cherry tomatoes start first, so we have lots of those including our beloved Sungolds.
Heirlooms are coming along, there’s a good selection now, but we’ll likely sell most of them before we can pick again, which will be Tuesday.
Plum tomatoes by the half bushel? We can’t take anymore advance orders, but there will be some extras available by chance throughout the season. This morning there are a few San Marzanos and Romas, first come, first serve.

Every so often you get an eggplant with a proboscis, and this one is a whopper! The eggplant crop is excellent, it’s early in the season which is when they have the fewest seeds.

Tomatoes have started to come in, a few plum tomatoes now and our field and beloved heirloom tomato’s will continue to trickle in slowly. And tons of wonderful cherry tomatoes. We are also open this Monday for the civic holiday!

Eggplants are officially in, and don’t they look great! Stay tuned for an update on tomatoes tomorrow…

It’s pretty obvious which leaves have grown since the last flood!
Zucchini, by the way.

Our pumpkin patch looks like a field of leaves now, but if you move some aside, you see the beginnings of a wonderful fall crop.