The Times They Are A Changin’: The Freeze is Coming

September represents a tipping point in the harvest for our farmer partners. As temperatures begin to dip at night, the season’s first freeze becomes imminent, and with it a wholesale shift in the harvest from the warm weather crops of summer to those that thrive in frosty nights and shorter days.

Right now we’re carefully watching forecasts, knowing that the end of summer heat is near and the first hard freeze of the fall and winter will crop up at any time. Summer our busiest production time as well. Until, of course the freeze hits. As the frost nears and passes by, we work closely with our growers in a preservation frenzy to put up the last of summer’s bounty. With summer behind us, we’ll turn our focus to root vegetables, frost-sweetened fall cabbages and delicious late fall fruits.

This year has been a lucky one – we’ve already had our first light freeze, but a good amount of the tomatoes, peppers and other warm-weather-loving produce made it through with just some wilted leaves as minor casualties. We should get another couple weeks of warm-weather-loving produce, our calendars right now mark a time when the agricultural world shifts for the year.

The Fruits of Fall: Pear and Apple

Never fear, the freeze doesn’t mean the end of delicious produce! When warm-weather crops disappear from the farms and our warehouse for the year, we start working with the hearty fruits and vegetables that survive and thrive during the colder months. For fruit, this means pears and apples are about to populate our production line. Simply Pears, Ripe Pears with Rosemary, and our coveted Pear Sauce round out our pear line. Our apples give us some tasty varieties of sauce, including a Classic Applesauce blend and our “applesauce for grown-ups,” Jonathan Applesauce: a sauce with some tart, complex flavor.

Fermenting Fervor: Season of Kim-Chis and Krauts

The Fruits of Fall: Pear and Apple

Never fear, the freeze doesn’t mean the end of delicious produce! When warm-weather crops disappear from the farms and our warehouse for the year, we start working with the hearty fruits and vegetables that survive and thrive during the colder months. For fruit, this means pears and apples are about to populate our production line. Simply Pears, Ripe Pears with Rosemary, and our covetedPear Sauce round out our pear line. Our apples give us some tasty varieties of sauce, including a Classic Applesauceblend and our “applesauce for grown-ups,” Jonathan Applesauce: a sauce with some tart, complex flavor.

Fermenting Fervor: Season of Kim-Chis and Krauts

As the cool weather descends, our focus is on our ferments. During summer, we’re often scrambling to keep up with the sheer volume of produce coming through our doors. As the produce rush slows down, the, we can spend our time on the much slower process of fermentation. While we continue to grow our selection of live-ferments, all of them share a necessarily longer time-horizon and slower pace as we wait for the natural process of lacto-fermentation to transform green and napa cabbages into delicious krauts, kim-chis, hot sauces and more.