There’s nothing quite like sinking your teeth into a beautifully ripe slice of watermelon and savoring that textbook bite of summer. There’s also nothing quite like cutting open the same watermelon and finding that it’s pale, and hard, and decidedly unready to eat. When we walk the fields and decide what to harvest for you each week, we are carefully checking for different signs in different crops to make sure that our timing is perfect.
Watermelons are a great example, because over the past years we’ve shown many of you our secrets for looking at a watermelon and knowing what’s going on inside the rind. You probably rap melons in the grocery store with your knuckles and listen for a hollow sound when you’re choosing which to take home. Maybe you also check the spot of discoloration on the skin where the melon rested on the ground, checking that it’s deepened from white to yellow. In the field, we can see that the tendrils connecting the melon to the vine have browned and dried. We know they’ll be ripe “about” 80 days from planting, but the difference between harvesting a melon on day 78 or day 82 can be tremendous!
The watermelons are nearing perfection- ready for picking this coming week. Cucumbers will be with us for a few weeks more. With the first harvest of tomatoes and summer carrots, we’re seeing a rainbow on the pack line slowly take the place of spring's variegated greens.
Eat well and be well!
