A field guide to
four Thursdays

Botanically a berry, and a nightshade — a first cousin of the potato, the pepper and the eggplant, all of which the farm also grows. The gel around the seeds is a germination inhibitor, which is why seeds never sprout inside a ripe fruit.

Growth habit splits the crop in two. Determinate plants set a terminal flower cluster, stop, and ripen one concentrated flush — the canning types. Indeterminate plants keep extending a vine and ripen continuously, which is what a CSA needs. Field tomatoes here run from about the first of August to the first hard frost, so a September share catches the absolute peak and the beginning of the end at once.

The same species, small-fruited. Sungold, the orange F1 that most Ontario growers keep in the tunnel, has the highest sugar-to-acid ratio of anything in the box — treat it as fruit. The splitting you see after a wet week is osmotic: the root takes up water faster than the skin can stretch. Cracked means ripe, not neglected.

One of the strangest single species on earth: zucchini, pattypan, acorn squash, delicata, spaghetti squash and most carving pumpkins are all C. pepo. Zucchini is simply the fruit picked immature, before the rind lignifies.

The plant is monoecious — separate male and female flowers, so it needs insect visits. A female flower already has a miniature fruit behind it; a male sits on a plain stem. Both are edible. Forty-five to fifty-five days, and in July heat a fruit goes from finger to baseball bat in about seventy-two hours, which is the whole story of the giant CSA zucchini. Frost-tender: one cold night ends the planting, which is why it is an either/or with beans this week.

Green beans, yellow wax beans, romano beans and the dry beans — kidney, black, navy, pinto — are one species at different harvest stages. A snap bean is the immature pod, with the string and the parchment layer bred out.

It fixes its own nitrogen through Rhizobium bacteria in root nodules, so beans are a standard rotation crop on an organic farm: they leave the ground richer than they found it. Bush types mature in about fifty days and flush all at once, so growers succession-plant every two or three weeks to keep a CSA in beans.

Also a berry, also a nightshade. Green peppers are simply unripe — left on the plant the same fruit turns red, yellow or orange, roughly doubles its sugar and gains a great deal of vitamin C and carotene. That extra time is expensive: seventy to ninety days from transplant, plus weeks of colour change, which is exactly why coloured sweet peppers are a late-August-to-September crop and why they are a confirmed item this week rather than a maybe.

Sweetness is not a separate species — bells, poblano, jalapeño, cayenne and paprika are all C. annuum. Sweet peppers are just the ones that lost the capsaicin pathway.

Capsaicin is made in glands on the placenta — the pale pith the seeds hang from — not in the seeds. Deseeding works only because you scrape the pith out with them. Jalapeño and cayenne are C. annuum; habanero and scotch bonnet are C. chinense, a separate domestication with a floral note behind the heat.

Brassica rapa is a domestication sprawl to rival the cabbage: turnip, napa cabbage, bok choy, tatsoi, mizuna, rapini, komatsuna and canola are all one species. Bok choy is the non-heading form, selected for thick white leaf stalks.

Cool-season and quick — forty to fifty days, and baby types twenty-five to thirty. It bolts under long hot days, so in Ontario it is a spring crop and an autumn crop with a gap through midsummer. Finding it in a September share is a signal in itself: the fall brassica planting has started to come in.

Not a crop but a recipe: baby lettuces for body, brassica greens for bite — mizuna, tatsoi, red mustard, arugula — and sometimes beet or chard thinnings for colour. Sown dense, cut at twenty-five to thirty-five days, and usually cut-and-come-again: the same bed regrows from intact growing points for a second and third harvest.

The email names the variety, and the variety is local history: ‘Music’ was brought from Italy by Al Music, a Norfolk County grower, in the 1980s, and named for him when he and twelve other growers founded the Ontario Garlic Growers Association in 1985. The farm calls it “the most common variety grown in Ontario (by far!)”. It is a Porcelain type — four to six very large cloves under a satiny white wrapper, strong sustained heat, and unusually good keeping for a hardneck, six to nine months somewhere cool and dry. Never the fridge.

Hardneck means it throws a flower stalk, the scape, in June, which is cut off to push energy back into the bulb and sold as a crop of its own. Garlic goes into the ground in October or November, overwinters, is lifted the following July and cured for two or three weeks.

A taproot: one swollen primary root storing sugar for a second-year flowering the grower never permits. Its wild form is the same species as Queen Anne's lace on the roadside out to St. Agatha — which is also why carrot seed crops must be isolated from it.

Orange is a recent taste. The domesticated carrot was purple and yellow in Central Asia; orange carotene types were selected in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Germination is slow and fussy, two to three weeks with the bed kept damp, and the soil has to be stone-free or the root forks. Cold makes them sweeter — as frost approaches the root converts starch to sugar as antifreeze, so an October carrot beats a September one.

Brassica oleracea is the textbook case of domestication working on different organs of a single wild Mediterranean cabbage: leaves became kale and collards, the terminal bud became cabbage, the lateral buds Brussels sprouts, the flower stalk broccoli, the arrested flower mass cauliflower, the stem kohlrabi. All one species; all interfertile.

Kale is acephala, “without a head” — the unmodified ancestral form. It yields for months from the same plant as you strip leaves upward, and it is genuinely improved by cold.

Florence fennel, finocchio, and a cousin of the carrot in the same family. The “bulb” is not a root — it is a rosette of overlapping swollen leaf bases sitting at ground level, which is why it is crisp and layered like celery rather than dense like a beet. Herb fennel is the same species without the swollen base; the seed spice is also this species.

The anise character is anethole, the same compound as in star anise and tarragon, and it largely cooks away. Raw and shaved the bulb is sweet and aggressive; roasted it turns mild and nutty. Cool-season and quick to bolt in heat, so in Ontario it is mostly an autumn crop.

A daisy, related to the sunflower, the artichoke and the dandelion, domesticated in Egypt from wild Lactuca serriola — originally for its oilseed. The plant bleeds a milky latex, lactucarium; the genus name means “milk”. That latex carries the bitterness and it surges when the plant bolts, so a bitter lettuce is a stressed or over-mature one.

Four types worth telling apart at the table: butterhead (soft, loose), romaine (upright, crunchy ribs), crisphead (iceberg) and looseleaf. Summer CSA lettuce is usually butterhead, leaf, or a Batavian summercrisp bred to resist bolting.

An Indian domesticate whose wild ancestor is savagely bitter from cucurbitacins, a defensive triterpene. Modern cultivars carry a gene that suppresses them, but heat, drought or irregular watering can switch production back on locally — the real reason for a bitter stem end.

The “ugly cucumbers” on the choice table are cosmetic culls: curved, waisted, club-shaped. The shape is almost always incomplete pollination — a cucumber needs several bee visits to fertilise the ovules along its whole length, and the underfertilised end never expands.

Two different plants share the name. The true scallion is the bunching onion, A. fistulosum, which never forms a bulb — hollow cylindrical leaves, about sixty days, cut all season. The other is a common onion, A. cepa, simply pulled young.

Another species doing several jobs at once: beetroot, Swiss chard, sugar beet and mangel fodder beet are all Beta vulgaris, selected for root, for leaf, for sucrose and for bulk. Beet greens and chard are therefore near-identical — cook the tops, don't bin them.

The red is betalain, a nitrogen-containing pigment unrelated to the anthocyanins that colour most red plants; only a handful of families use it. The earthiness is geosmin, the same compound you smell in soil after rain. And a beet “seed” is really a dried fruit cluster holding several seeds, which is why beets come up in clumps and have to be thinned.

Salad rocket — and a mustard, not a lettuce. The pepper comes from glucosinolates converting to isothiocyanates as the chewed leaf ruptures, the same defensive chemistry as mustard, horseradish and wasabi. Heat, drought and age all raise the concentration, so spring and autumn arugula is mild where midsummer arugula is fierce.

Three weeks to baby leaf, forty days to full size, cool-season — which makes it a September and October choice-table regular. The white four-petalled flowers are edible and taste like a concentrated version of the leaf.

Not plants, and more closely related to animals than to anything else in the bag. The mushroom is only the fruiting body; the organism is the mycelium threaded through its substrate. Both of these are saprotrophs digesting dead wood, which is why they can be grown on sawdust or straw blocks indoors year-round while everything else here waits on frost.

Oyster mushrooms are fan-shaped, shelving and fast, and — improbably — facultative carnivores that trap and digest nematodes. Shiitake are grown on oak logs or supplemented sawdust and are loaded with the umami nucleotide guanylate; the stems are too tough to eat but make excellent stock. The share is ½ lb weekly from Sunshine Farms in Brussels, Ontario.