Molly has been telling me that some of the produce is arriving too ripe and hence damaged. As you may know we tend to err on the side of ripe when we pick because that is the tastiest and the most nutritious produce. We know we tread a fine line between ripe and too ripe. The later can get destroyed traveling down I 80. This is a particular problem with Tomatoes and Stone Fruit.
We like to give you a variation in ripeness of tomatoes so that you have fruit to enjoy all week long. We also ask Anna and Isabel to pack you tomatoes in a timely manner. If one bad tomato gets in your bag then it can mess up all the others by the time it gets to your kitchen.
The easy answer to all of this is to pick under ripe fruit just like we would if we wholesaled to stores or to send back East. But we stopped doing this because we did not like the fruit we were shipping out. It looked great but never had the flavor of truly vine ripened fruit.
We do have the cardboard dividers but Jose has not been using them as he has said that he cannot fit everything in the box with them. This summer has been an abundant one, there have been many items extra to the value of the box. What we plan to do is to have quality sessions with the picking and packing crew over the next few weeks to fine tune the fruit in your box.
If you ever have fruit or produce that does not arrive in a good condition, for whatever reason, please just send Molly an email. We will be happy to replace them. At this point I would like to continue with ripe fruit. Nigel