Each year, the summer brings a bevy of new vegetables, including the rich array of tempting varieties of Chubeza’s squash and pumpkins. This ensemble comes in green, yellow, orange or beige, dotted and striped, smooth and coarse, round, oval, pear-shaped, pinecone-shaped, pointed, flat, small, large, and even extra-large. What a field day for the lovely, colorful curcurbitas (Latin for the entire gourd family), all so beautiful and tasty!
Summer exudes the aroma of the ocean, the pool, and sunscreen, and of ripe fruit – melon, figs, grapes, and overripe peaches. In our packing house, summer carries the heady aroma of basil. When the basil-laden boxes stand in the packing house, it’s hard to ignore the heady scent in the air that spurs the taste buds to fantasize on pesto.
Corn is one of the first crops the Americans learned to grow. Some 7,000 years ago, gleaners (from Central America) noticed a spontaneous mutation among the weeds, a teosinte, with a cob that was longer and filled with seeds larger than in your average ancient weed. Something sparked their intuition, and they tasted it – to their great delight. They also discovered that seeds which fell to the ground germinated to become a mature plant that yielded more cobs. After some time, they learned that if they saved and seeded the best choice seeds, the next crop would be even better! Thus, in the process of selecting the optimal plants to grow and harvest from year to year, the “cultured corn” developed sporting large, juicy kernels securely attached to the cob. Today, corn is one of the few plants which cannot reproduce without human aid, since manual separation of the kernels is a must for germination.
On Shavuot, the wheat harvest festival, we’re reminded of a song that holds great pain along with reconciliation and hope: The Wheat Still Grows Again. The words were penned in 1974, following the Yom Kippur War, by poet Dorit Tzameret, a member of Kibbutz Beit Hashita where 11 of its sons fell in the war. It was composed to music four years later by Chaim Barkani, becoming one of the songs that has since accompanied this country, its crises, challenges and growth.
Amidst the days last fall of terrible shock and mourning, despite the hardship and pain, the wheat fields throughout Israel as a whole and the Western Negev in particular, sprouted and flourished once more. Uri Ravitz, a member of Kibbutz Nachal Oz whose mother Alma Avraham was kidnapped on October 7th (and has since thankfully returned), asked to make slight revisions to the words of the song. He changed “the depths of the North” to “the Western Negev,” adding along with the strength that accompanies the renewed growth of wheat also a cry and a demand for the return of the hostages.
It’s not the same Negev, and not the same house,
You’re gone and must return.
The path with the boulevard, and an eagle in the sky
Yet the wheat still grows again.
Summer officially arrives in three weeks on June 21st, but though this spring has been very pleasant and (mostly) not-too-hot, this week’s heatwave hit us hard. Yet while we moan and groan about the oppressive heat, the watermelon remains unfazed. It just loves the heat, a throwback to its origins in the southern part of the African continent, the Kalahari Desert. In the scorching desert, the watermelon, boasting a more-than-90% water content, was an important, vital source of liquid to humankind and wild animals. The difficulty in choosing a good watermelon is an old story. Even in its wild form, the sweet watermelon is identical on the outside to a bitter watermelon, necessitating the thirsty passerby to punch a hole in the watermelon rind to test its taste.
FIESTA MELONS / Sylvia Plath
In Benidorm there are melons,
Whole donkey-carts full
Of innumerable melons,
Ovals and balls,
Bright green and thumpable
Laced over with stripes
Of turtle-dark green.
Chooose an egg-shape, a world-shape,
Bowl one homeward to taste
In the whitehot noon :
Cream-smooth honeydews,
Pink-pulped whoppers,
Bump-rinded cantaloupes
With orange cores.
Each wedge wears a studding
Of blanched seeds or black seeds
To strew like confetti
Under the feet of
This market of melon-eating
Fiesta-goers.
Over the last few weeks, we began harvesting our first beds of fakus, aka “Arabic cucumber.” For years, this event was followed by messages from you like, “This week I received two portions of zucchini (or cucumbers) in my box!” Thus, this year we hope to introduce those unfamiliar with the wonderful fakus, and ease its recognition by those in the know, by distributing the fakus alongside its cousins the zucchini and cucumber. (For now, the beginning of the fakus harvest, not all boxes will receive them.)
To properly meet the fakus and easily distinguish him from the zucchini, here’s what I learned from our longtime client Tzipi from Jerusalem: the fakus stem resembles that of a cucumber, not zucchini! If you received a light-colored elongated vegetable that kind-of-resembles-zucchini-but-kind-of-doesn’t, check out its stem (the part where it attached to the plant): if it is wide and star-shaped like a zucchini, well… it’s a zucchini. If it’s thin and willowy like a cucumber, then say hi to our friend the fakus.
DANDELION
The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions
is this single kernel of bright yellow
dropped on our path by the sun, sensing
that we might need some marker to help us
find our way through life, to find a path
over the snow-flattened grass that was
blade by blade unbending into green,
on a morning early in April, this happening
just at the moment I thought we were lost
and I’d stopped to look around, hoping
to see something I recognized. And there
it was, a commonplace dandelion, right
at my feet, the first to bloom, especially
yellow, as if pleased to have been the one,
chosen from all the others, to show us the way.
Ted Kooser
Over the past few weeks, you’ve been receiving one of the first vegetables of spring – squash! The good news is that this is just the beginning – there are more varieties on the way! As the pioneer of its family, we happily dedicate this rainy spring Newsletter to this remarkable vegetable.
Squash (zucchini) belongs to the prominent Cucurbitaceae family, a very diverse, widespread clan whose members are grown primarily for food, but also for other interesting uses. The Cucurbitaceae family tree splits into five main branches: 1. cucumber, fakus and melon; 2. watermelon; 3. various types of pumpkins and squashes; 4. the ornamental, inedible pumpkin used for decorative purposes and to make serving utensils and musical instruments; and 5. Lupa pumpkins, whose flesh is used to create natural sponges.