Temperatures near 100 degrees every day last week brought most of our greens to their knees - almost did us in too.  June is a little early for that stuff!  I love summer weather, but triple-digits are hard to work in past mid-day.  We were struggling just to get the harvesting done last week; thankfully this week looks to be a bit cooler, and it's going to be an incredibly busy catch-up week.  Farming is in a way all about timing, and falling behind in the summer can mean we don't catch up again with it all 'til fall.  We're about to hit our busiest month of the year: the spring crops desperately need to be cleaned up, the summer crops are hitting their peak, and yes, we already need to get on sowing fall crops.  Even though there's a good 14 hours of daylight out there now, it never feels like enough time!

Tons of Sungolds this week!  All that heat and light is also starting to ripen the larger tomatoes...just a smattering of them this week, mostly red 'Big Beef' slicer tomatoes, Cherokee Purple and Marianna's Peace heirlooms, a handful of romas.  As I mentioned last week, most fruiting crops start ripening up as a trickle, then quickly turn into a flood (we had a "few" Sungolds last week; we spent over three hours picking enough Sungolds to feed half the county this morning).  The larger tomatoes are sure to go quickly this week, but if we miss you with them, we'll probably have a truckload by next week! 

Eggplant loves heat, heat, and more heat, and it wasn't much of a surprise to see some coming in already late last week.  "Rosa Bianca' eggplants are gorgeous-looking pale purple fruits that have a sweeter, milder flavor, and creamier, firmer texture than the more familiar black eggplant - try them sliced into thick "steaks," brushed with olive oil, and cooked up on the grill. 

Probably just another two to three weeks for celery, carrots, and beets.  Check out last week's preserving tip for putting up celery in your freezer.  Root crops like carrots and beets are the simplest of all to preserve - just remove the tops, throw the roots in a bag, and they'll keep in your fridge for two to three months - almost until our fall root crops return!

Thank you all so much for your business, eat well, and have yourself a great week!

Saturday marks the official first day of summer.  Someone apparently told the corn and tomatoes, and they're gonna be here right on the mark.  Vegetables are not like cats - sometimes you can actually get them to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it :)

Our corn is the non-genetically modified, non-sugary-gene-enhanced, never-sprayed kind of sweet corn you really should rush from the bag to your cooking pot before it goes from sweet to starchy.  We shuck and trim it for you ahead of time, since organic corn can often come with a few unwanted friends.  Our hens enjoy those earworms a lot more than you do, and can turn them into tasty eggs to boot.  I've been checking the corn just about hourly lately; it's not quite ripe enough yet for Wednesday's business, but will surely be ready for the weekend.  We'll catch those of you who pick up your produce on Wednesdays next week with the corn.

The Sungold cherry tomatoes are also starting to ripen up.  As with most fruiting crops, it starts with a trickle of a harvest, then quickly turns into a flood of tomatoes, so please do expect limited quantities for now.  If you have never eaten a Sungold before, yes, they're supposed to be orange, yes they're amazingly sweet and fruity, and yes they are slightly(?) addictive.  Please don't hunt us down and hurt us if we run out early; there will be many, many more in the very near future.  The larger 'real' tomatoes aren't far behind.

The kale is starting to fade away in the heat; this might be our last week for it, and with smallish quantities at that.  There's no end to the squash and cucumbers right now; it's an all-you-can-eat affair out there, and a great time to think about pickling if that's your thing.  If you are looking for larger quantities of either squash or cukes, please contact me in advance, and we'll work out a bulk price for you. 

The potatoes and onions are starting to dry down a bit, but aren't quite ready for pulling and curing.  Both varieties of potatoes are still "new."  The sweet or red onions are still uncured, but won't come to you with green tops anymore.  We always hope to get both out of the ground, cured, and boxed up for storage before the onslaught of tomatoes begins, but we need dry weather to accomplish the task.  If I had to pick two or three weeks out of the year when I pray to everything out there that it will not rain, these next few weeks are it.  Think DRY thoughts for us!

Labor is always our limiting factor in how much we can accomplish on our farm (even the hens get put to work, cleaning up spent crops).  It's just the two of us grubby little farmers working out here every day, and while we don't pay ourselves an hourly wage (I hate to think what that would work out to), while we're working I am forever thinking, "how long is this taking to do, and what kind of return are we going to get on it?"  We aren't looking to get rich, live extravagantly, or build an agricultural empire, but we do need to pay the bills, and look to enjoy an hour or two of down-time per day in the summer.  And then there's the fact that I tend to be quite the stickler when it comes to efficiency, and prioritizing comes pouring out of my head as naturally as you breathe.   A bed of baby greens that's gotten overrun with weeds might take 12 hours to weed by hand.  That's likely to get mowed down and turned under if there are 50 other things that need doing on the same day.  Out-of-season crops are sure to sell, but take much more labor to produce.  And everything here is done by hand...I can guarantee you those $1.49/lb beans at the supermarket were picked with a mechanical harvester - no human hand has ever touched them.

The point I'm slowly getting around to that I don't really want to get around to, is that we need to go up on a few of our prices.  You'll see a few increases this week, you'll probably see a few increases in months to come.  Just a few.  I always want to keep our prices at a reasonable, affordable level.  I know that organic produce already tends to cost more (it's that pesky labor issue again).  But if out-of-season lettuce is taking me far more time to produce, I need to ask a little more for it.  Beans are easy to grow, but incredibly time-consuming to pick.  I'm no slouch, but if snap beans take me a quarter of the day to harvest by hand, I need to go up a little on it.  We've always asked a little more for Diva cucumbers, because they take at least an hour a day every day to pick, no matter how fast I move.  I will never be able to produce carrots or squash for a dollar a pound, no matter how efficiently I go about it.  If no one's willing to pay those prices, then logically we need to drop those crops from our roster, and focus on crops that do pay.

Anyway, enough about small farm economics, and on to what's been going on around here lately.  Our kales and chard should be available for a few more weeks, but slow down a bit in the heat, and so we have smaller quantities available than in weeks past.  The field lettuces are bolting in the long, warm days, but we try to have some sort of shade-grown salad greens throughout the summer, providing the water to produce them remains available - sweet crunchy romaines this week!  Snap beans are here, as always, thankfully right after the peas are done (no one in their right mind wants to pick fiddly little peas and beans at the same time).  We're also starting to dig potatoes.  "New" potatoes can be large or small, what makes them lovely is that they have a higher moisture content and a sweeter, lighter flavor than stored potatoes.  We dig up new potatoes as needed for a few weeks until the entire crop needs to be pulled up and stored for the summer...new potatoes are truly a short-lived seasonal treat!

June already!  Otherwise known around here as never-enough-time-month, even though the days are stretching as long as they ever will.  Squash and cucumbers need to be picked every morning, the irrigation constantly rotates through the fields, something always needs cleaning up, something always needs planting, something always needs tying up.

We try to grow as many crops as we can vertically, up trellises, to save as much space as possible.  The tomato vines in particular grow about three feet a week in June, which means I'm out there almost every day in June lashing the vines up against the fences to keep them upright, then tying them up again...and again...and again.  The smell of a tomato plant is one of my favorite smells in the world.  But on a hot sunny summer afternoon, surrounded by over a thousand tomato plants growing at a slow lunge, that lovely smell hits a fever pitch...and all of a sudden I'll feel like that lady who just took a bath in cheap perfume just sat down next to me on a hot crowded bus.  Woozy, and it's time to put the twine away, move on to something else, and get back at it the next day. 

All three varieties of our cucumbers are coming in quickly now, and while I know the pricing may look confusing, it all works out to roughly the same price per pound of cucumber.  Our regular garden cucumbers are an old southern heirloom variety called 'General Lee.'  English cucumbers are longer, with thinner skins and fewer seeds.  Diva cucumbers are smaller, very sweet and crunchy cukes with very thin skins and hardly any seeds.

While the heat pushes the squash, cucumbers, and tomato vines to grow like kudzu, it also causes some of the more delicate, cool-season crops to fade away, so be sure to get your fill now.  The peas are already done (smart customers gorge on a favorite vegetable when I warn you every week: these have a really short season!), same for the broccoli.  This is likely the last week for most head lettuces, collards and radishes. 

Thank you all so much for your business, for some fabulously busy farmers markets in recent weeks, and have yourself a great week!