Tomato season is fast approaching. We should be picking our first couple of ripe slicers this week, and soon it will be an avalanche! We're anxiously awaiting many different harvests to start in earnest, including: tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapenos, and flowers - it looks like we'll have a dahlia or two blooming soon, and not long after the gladiolus will follow suit. Look for those flower bunches as well as more beautiful Dragon's Breath Farm bouquets coming soon as an extras purchase in your Harvie profiles!
The main struggle of July for small farms like ours is keeping up with the harvesting, as well as keeping up with the planting. It's still fairly early in the growing season and we need to keep planting like it's Spring in order for their to be a bounteous harvest all the way up through fall. The difference tho, is that in the Spring we're starting out with nice clean, moist beds. Now, all of our beds have been planted, and before we can put in a new crop, the residue from the old crop needs to be cleaned up and removed. Sometimes that's no big deal...a bed of just harvested carrots or radishes doesn't leave much of a trace. But to replant say, the brassica block, now that's another proposition entirely. Broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower - those stems grow thick and tough, and they all have to be removed (at least the above ground portions!), we also plant into landscape fabric, so that all must be removed as well as the 100s of staples that hold it down, wait a minute...I forgot that we grow brassicas under insect netting, so we'd better remove the wire hoops and netting first, then we need to level out and rake the beds, likely switch around irrigation...etc. It's easy to see how simply going out to seed a bed of radish doesn't seem so simple when we follow our crop map and find ourselves staring at the 'future radish bed' that is currently the 'jungle of broccolis past', lol. So wish us luck as we have A LOT of planting to do in the next week, and A LOT of planting prep that seems a little daunting!
This is a wonderful time of year to be eating fresh and local - we hope you all have been enjoying your boxes! Remember to scroll down on your 'It's time to Customize' emails to see recipes and tips specific to your box that week. We'd also recommend checking out Dishing up the Dirt - it's a great resource where you can search recipes by vegetable type. We were super impressed, they have 16 for garlic scapes alone!
Look forward to seeing you all at pick up this week!
Cheers, Bonnie & Rudy
PS. Thank you for for the thoughts and well wishes for Bonnie's dad last week. He is doing well, but will have a long road to recovery - luckily his nature is to put his head down and do the work for however long it takes. He should be at home and healing by early next week!
