Farm Shares for July 5, 2023

Happy July! It's tough to bend the work of farming around holidays, so this week's Farm Share runs on schedule. We'll celebrate our country's independence while farming for you on Tuesday, July 4, and we'll have your food (and flowers) like usual on Wednesday, July 5th. 

And it's now HOT and WET. We're glad to not enter drought status, but this has been a lot of rain recently. Whew! We adjust and adapt with the weather as needed and continue seeding, planting, tending plants, weeding, and harvesting each week.

Pictured above is our employee Siera using a wheel hoe to remove the weeds between two beds where we seeded Green Beans. (Due to hard rains, we got terrible germination from these Green Bean seedings, so we'll seed again and there will be, at minimum, a delay in our Green Bean harvest. Stay tuned!

Heads up: Our slicing tomato harvest yield has decreased dramatically, so we have fewer Tomatoes available for you this week. We hope this will turn around soon and will keep you updated! The next successions of plants look good right now, so we'll keep our fingers crossed!

NEW CROPS we're harvesting now include...

EGGPLANTS - remember these beauties are best thought of as sponges. They soak up deliciousness that you put on them. We love them doused with olive oil, roasted, and sprinkled with sea salt. Roast them until their edges are a little crispy!

SHISHITO PEPPERS - These are frying peppers. Saute them WHOLE (stems and everything!) in the oil of your choice until they blister, then sprinkle with sea salt. To eat: pick up a pepper by the stem, bite the pepper up to the stem and enjoy their amazing flavor. So, so good. 

LUNCHBOX PEPPERS - These are snack size sweet peppers. We prefer to eat them raw, on their own, as a snack. But you can slice them on salads or stuff with cheese and roast. 

For our every-other-week members that didn't get to read about our Tomato Grafting last week, here's repeat of that info:

We do numerous things to decrease the chances of disease pressure on the plants we grow. We alter the timing of the planting to avoid times of year when a particular disease for a particular crop is most common (some mildew diseases travel on the wind at a certain time each year), we purchase varieties of plants that are resistant to a disease that we know is problematic here, and we graft some plants onto root-stock that is resistant to a known disease. 

What is grafting vegetable plants?? (Pictured above = grafted tomato plants growing in our greenhouse after their healing chamber phase is complete. The plastic clip and tiny stake are still attached for support.)

Dan dove into Tomato grafting 10 years ago as a way to increase our tomato plant health and harvest yield. Grafting = this process: Seed two different tomato varieties on the same day. One of the varieties has very strong soil borne disease resistance but yields unappealing fruit. The other variety grows delicious fruit but is quite susceptible to soil-borne disease. When both plants grow to a particular size, Dan cuts the stem of each plant at a precise angle, tossing out the top half of the variety that grows gross fruit and tossing out the bottom half of the variety that is susceptible to disease. Then he aligns the bottom half of the root stock (soil born disease resistant variety) up against the matching angle of the top half of the delicious fruit variety and places a gentle clip over the spot where the two stems meet. Then the plants go in a healing chamber with specific temperature, humidity, and light. After the needed number of days, the plants are ready to go back to the greenhouse to get growing again. Then we plant them in the ground and hopefully get to enjoy the benefits of BOTH soil born disease resistance AND delicious tomatoes.   It’s a challenging and time-consuming task to do well, but a sweet reward when it all works.