Hot Peppers

• Shishito: This is a Japanese pepper used for tempura. It’s great pickled or roasted. Most of the green ones have a hot pepper background flavor, but little or no heat. When they turn red, they have a bit of heat. They can be used like padron peppers or pepperoncini.
• Beaver Dam*: Shaped like a hefty bull’s horn pepper, with rich flavor. This year’s Beaver Dams seem to be hotter than last year’s, but still not as hot as a jalapeno. Great for spaghetti sauce or roasting. The grower (in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin) who preserved this variety says it’s good on bologna and cheese sandwiches. You have to understand that bologna in Wisconsin comes in a ring, tastes great, and has no relationship to that stuff in the blister package at the grocery store.
• Wenks Yellow Hots*: A New Mexico Chile, one step down from jalapeno, Thick flesh, good for pickling,
• Black Hungarian: One step down from Jalapeno. Wonderful flavor. When they turn brick red at the end of the season, they are sweet as well as hot. This is the earliest hot pepper we grow.
• Jalapeno: You know what a jalapeno is like. Our supply is limited this season.
• Red Rocket Cayenne: A classic cayenne, good for drying as well as fresh.
• Fish*: African American heirloom pepper. The “secret” ingredient used around Chesapeake Bay for crab feasts and spiced shrimp.
• Orange Thai: Inch long, hotter than Red Rocket, fine flavor. We sell them dried in hanging garlands and in small packages.
• Serrano: hotter than a jalapeno, and with thicker flesh than Cayenne or Thai peppers. No need to remove the seeds, just cut it into fine slices for salsa.
• Dwarf Cayenne: a selection from the Organic Seed Partnership, developed at Flanders Bay Farm on Long Island, N.Y. It’s quite a bit hotter than Red Rocket.

Really Hot Peppers

• Scotch Bonnet-Hold onto your hats, this gets into some serious heat but also nice flavor, comes in a variety of colors and goes well with most Mexican dishes. Scotch Bonnet and the Habaneros are capsicum chinenses, a different species than the other hot peppers. Ours live up to their reputation. They are hotter than any of the capsicum annuum varieties. Scotch Bonnet is the largest of these, and just s few steps down from the Habaneros in terms of heat.
• Hinkelhatz*: Who would have guessed that those PA Dutch Farmers would have a pepper almost as hot as a habanero? They make a vinegar–based hot sauce which is used to season sauerkraut.
• Habanero- great for sauces, extreme salsa or adding a lot of spice to just about anything. We are also researching the medicinal and spiritual properties of Habaneros. Any insight is greatly appreciated.
• Tepin- The world's hottest, act accordingly and use sparingly. Currently in feasibility trials for adaptability to our climate.

Micro Greens
A mix of the tiny first leaves of lettuce, arugula, mizuna, tatsoi, cabbage, broccoli, rapini, and other leafy greens. They have an amazing taste and texture and great nutrition. They can be used as a complete salad, or as a garnish on salads, soups, and sandwiches.

Peas
We grow both English (shelling) peas and snap peas. Our snap peas are Oregon Sugar Pod II, Sugar Snap, and a unique Golden Snap Pea, an heirloom from South Asia. Steaming or stir-frying brings out the fine flavor of Golden Snap Peas, which are not as sweet as the green varieties. Snap peas are ready from June through mid-July. The shelling peas are Alderman and British.

Summer Squash

• Costata Romanesco: the only zucchini we grow, because it is so superior to other varieties. It is larger when it flowers, and keeps its fine quality without getting tough or seedy up to fifteen inches. It is pale green with white spots and lengthwise ridges. It has more flavor than other zucchinis.
• Yellow Crookneck: an American heirloom with fantastic flavor. The classic way to prepare it is to sauté it in butter with onion. It's also good raw or mixed with other summer vegetables.
• Pattypan or Scaloppini: little squash shaped like flying saucers. We have yellow, green, and white ones.
• Tromboncini: This is a summer moschata squash, of the same species as the winter butternut squash. It has a fine distinctive taste and it is more substantial than zucchini, not adding so much juice to vegetable dishes. It's a great favorite with farmers' market customers.

Bush Beans

• Provider - a classic green beans
• Jaune de Montreal - a meaty wax bean from seeds we originally found in a farmers market in Montreal
• Cupidon - a French filet bean
• Major - a tender yellow wax bean Bush beans are available in July. We keep picking them until the pole beans are ready.

Pole Beans

• Musica Green Romano
• Goldmarie Romano
• Fortex Haricots Verts
• Purple (Violet Podded Stringless)
• Rattlesnake - an heirloom green bean streaked with purple
• Garden of Eden Romano
• Yellow Wax beans

Pole beans are the very best beans you can get. They are available starting early in August and keep going until late September. At the peak of the season, we pick about 150 pounds a week. We deliver beans within 24 hours of being picked.

Shelly Beans

• Borlotto
• Rattlesnake
• Scozzesi
• Lamon

Shelly beans are mature but not dry bean seeds. We usually cook them in ¼ inch of water with a little olive oil and a sprig of thyme or sage. Depending on their size and maturity, they can take 20 to 30 minutes to become tender. Cooked shell beans are a great salad ingredient or side dish.

Eggplant

• Bambino
• Fairytale
• Asian varieties
• Firenze
• Turkish Orange

We have tried more than 50 varieties of eggplant over the last 8 years, in search of varieties which are delicious and tender (we will not sell an eggplant which has to be peeled!) and which will grow and produce well in our challenging micro-climate. (We get one or two night in the 30º's every month of the summer.) The miniature Bambino and Fairytale (both hybrids) meet the test. Firenze, a robust light purple Italian heirloom is not very productive for us, but it is so good we grow it any way. Turkish Orange, another small heirloom variety, is very productive and intensely flavored.

Sweet Peppers
Unusual, tasty and beautiful sweet peppers including several paprikas, light green Gypsy, Goat Horn and Bulls Horn, Belgian Red, and Cuneo Yellow are available from August until frost. Our favorite sweet pepper is Jimmy Nardello, a wrinkled bright red incredibly tasty pepper which ripens in September.

Garlic
There are two categories of garlic: hard-necked and soft-necked. These are further divided into sub-species (rocambole, porcelain, purple-striped, artichoke, silverskin, and others.) Hard-necked garlic has a single circle of cloves around the base of the hard neck, is usually more intensely flavored and is easier to peel. It does not keep as well as soft-necked varieties. Soft-necked garlic is usually milder in flavor, has multiple layers of cloves with no inedible core, is harder to peel, and keeps longer. Perhaps the intensity with which the clove wrappers stick to the cloves of soft-neck garlic protects the quality for a few more months.

Garlic rarely reproduces from flowers and seeds. Each garlic bulb, containing 4 to 50 cloves, clones itself as the cloves becomes new bulbs ten months after planting. Hard-necked garlic has an additional reproductive strategy, the production of shoots containing bundles of tiny garlic clones. Each garlic clone from the shoot produces a new bulb of garlic, but it takes almost two years. Garlic reproduction does not involve pollen and seed production that would allow for cross-fertilization and hybridization, but garlic mutates freely. There are thousands of distinct varieties of garlic.

At Gales Meadow Farm and throughout the maritime Northwest, garlic is planted in the fall. The bulbs harvested in July and August are broken into individual cloves, and pushed into a prepared bed with the rooting end down and the pointed tip of the clove 1 to 2 inches below the surface. They emerge from November to February. A long spell with the temperature in the teens or single digits may freeze the emerging tip, but has no harmful effect on the garlic growing underground.

By March, garlic is growing fast, sending up one long grass-like leaf after another. These leaves can be harvested lightly from March to May and added to stir-fries and salads.

Starting in May, the entire garlic can be pulled. At that point, it looks like a spring onion, but the taste is unmistakably garlic. Garlic scallions are available at the market through early June.

Hard-necked garlic grows a shoot (also called a scape or a whistle) six weeks before it is ready for harvest. The stem is coiled at first and slowly unwinds over a week or two. The tip contains a bundle of tiny garlic clones inside a pointed wrapper. The flavor of the shoots is truly garlic, but lighter with a fine fresh quality. They are available from late May through early July.

For a fleeting few weeks in June, fresh garlic is available. This is fully formed but immature garlic. There is nothing like it for Spanish or Italian garlic soups, for simple pasta sauces of garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese. The bulb wrapper is peeled from fresh garlic, but the cloves wrappers are soft, so there is no need to peel them.

The main garlic harvest starts in July, when the outer leaves of each garlic plant have turned brown but they still have two or three green inner leaves. Garlic is dug, and cured in a dry, airy, shady place for at least a week. It is then sorted, cleaned by removing a layer or two of bulb wrapper skin, trimmed, and brought to the market. The different varieties ripen over a six-week period so some of the early varieties might be sold out before the later ones are available.

At Gales Meadow Farm, we grow more than twenty varieties of hard- and soft-necked garlic. We save the biggest and best for planting (sorry about tha t), sell the next biggest as individual bulbs labeled by variety, and sell smaller bulbs by the pint, with the varieties mixed. We sell two excellent varieties, a silverskin and California Late, in braids.

Garlic should be stored out of direct sunlight in an airy, dry location - not right next to the stove or the sink and most definitely not in the refrigerator. The hard-necks are all good until New Year’s Day and some keep their quality until February. Then they dry out and may sprout. Soft-necked varieties usually keep until March or even April. At some point, a bright green shoot is apparent inside the clove. This shoot can be bitter, so it should be cut out. After April, last year’s garlic is not good anymore. But by then, the new garlic has edible leaves. A garlic lover can indulge every season of the year.

Fresh Herbs

• Thyme
• Mint
• Dill
• Oregano
• Savory
• Italian Parsley
• Tarragon
• Fennel Leaves
• Sage - green and purple
• Lavender