This morning ended a stretch of 44 days without rain falling on our farm. We received less than 0.125 inches in the overnight from Sunday into this Monday morning, not nearly enough to halt our field irrigations. The last two weeks of heat really got our summer vegetable plants and summer weeds growing very very quickly. The orient express variety of eggplant in your CSA shares this week are producing three weeks ahead of what we have seen in past years, despite a somewhat later seeding date in our green house. Some pig-weed, wild amaranth, we have seen double in size weekly to top out at about 4 feet. And we have sweet corn plants in tassel with ears sizing up along their stems, I think that is just crazy. Our soil temperature has been above 70 degrees for at least one month, and in this last week holding at 78 degrees each day. In comparison, in 2014 July 18th marked our first day of the soil temperature reaching 70 degrees and our highest logged was 72 degrees in August.
In Your Share This Week:
- Carrots
- Chard
- Cucumbers
- Eggplant
- Green Onions
- Lettuce
- Potatoes
- Summer Squash
Crop Notes
Carrots, Ya-Ya: Harvested from the same sandy field as the previous week’s harvest and potentially even a bit sweeter because they were chilled in our cooler for one week.
Lettuce : A mix of head lettuce varieties for you this week that were harvested up from underneath a forest of one of our most rambunctious and prolific farm weeds, Pig-weed. This year has just been unbelievable with how the heat really conjures up multiple flushes of germinating weed seeds. To our advantage, in a way, the shade of those weeds does an excellent job shading a mature, ready for harvest lettuce plant from excessive sun.
Potatoes, new: Still considered new potatoes because their skins have not yet set, this week both varieties, Carola and Red Gold have a tasty yellow flesh. These spuds have been grown with absolutely no additional irrigation, you can probably tell from the depth of taste they will provide you at dinner.
Summer Squash, Safari, Dunja, Y-star & Gold: We allowed this week’s zucchini varieties to size up slightly to provide different culinary opportunities, like stuffing and deep frying, they taste as smooth and sweet as usual.
Meet Your Farmer
Sidonie Harper-McPike