Farm Notes, by Jeanne and Steve

We officially still have a month left of summer, so why does it feel like fall already? The kids are heading off to school, and it’s a chilly 52 degrees with thick drippy fog. We’re thinking forward to the fall planting and harvest season— apples, winter squashes, pumpkins – and of course planning for our fall Harvest Festival and Pumpkin Patch coming up October 6^th.

Nonetheless, some of the mid-summer vegetables are just getting started, and they can keep us in a summer frame of mind for the next couple months. Tomatoes are still just beginning and the flavor is improving every day—soon we’ll have more tomatoes than we know what to do with. (Managing irrigation with the tomatoes becomes tricky at this point—too much water and the tomatoes will be pasty and flavorless, too little and they develop the dreaded blossom-end rot.) You can see in the picture the nifty trellising system of strings suspended from the roof of the greenhouse–it was too time consuming to trellis all the tomatoes and some varieties need it more than others, but we will have the strings already in place for next year. Our hoophouses became a total hodge-podge of mixed up varieties because we had to replant several times to fill in blank spaces after we lost plants due to dampening-off or gophers. Therefore, it isn’t always easy to tell what is what, but in general, the small “saladette” tomatoes are a variety called Estiva, the larger “slicing” tomatoes are either Big-Beef or Defiant, the very large ones with greenish purple shoulders are Cherokee Purple, and the orange tomatoes are Valencia. These last two are both heirloom varieties.

Bell and Corno di Toro peppers are also coming in now. Because we got around to planting them late, the Padron Peppers  will be lagging behind this year. Our crop of Rosa Bianca eggplant looks beautiful, but it is just flowering now (see picture of beautiful purple eggplant flower), so it’ll be some time before we can harvest the fruits. We’re harvesting a new crop of filet beans this week and they are super crisp and tasty. A new basil planting will be ready to pick soon. We continue to harvest strawberries, summer squash, potatoes, leeks, kales, lettuces, herbs, scallions, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and swiss chard, that are all at their summer peak.

And we have just the thing to extend the summer feeling a little longer – who’s up for a strawberry u-pick? We want to give you the opportunity to come out one more time to pick your own so you can stock up on jam or frozen berries for winter or make a strawberry dessert for your Labor day festivities. We’ve scheduled a u-pick day for Saturday September 1^st. Come out to our Redman ranch (Hwy 1 and Riverside Drive in Watsonville) anytime from 10 am to 3 pm. Non-CSA friends are welcome too. Viva la summer!