Chard, green pepper, sweet onions, summer squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce. The “green pepper” is Gypsy Queens and I’ve been told this is the traditional stage for harvest, but I prefer them when they’re an orange/red so in the past that’s when we’ve harvested them. This year we needed to thin the fruit a bit because the plants are still too small for as much fruit as they’ve set so we’re giving out some at the “green” stage. The lettuce has been struggling with this heat and the romaine we’re giving out is both small, and bolting – meaning it’s prematurely going to flower. The leaves should still be nice and sweet (at least the ones I ate were), and today we had a bit of green crisp that we were able to salvage from the fields, too. We may have some other lettuce to go along with Monday’s shares as well.
Pretty much everything has struggled with the extreme weather this year, the swing from our record setting wet/cold spring and the rapid transition to a record setting hot summer. The one thing that seems to be doing ok at this point is the chard so there’s a nice big bunch in the share. The summer squash and cucumbers have been limping along. Although we’ve had just enough to put in all of the shares so far, it’s definitely not the quality or quantity we’d hoped for.
Today’s field work was all about clearing weeds. We’ve almost made it through all of the leeks at this point and they’re looking much better. We got a start on the chard, too, and knocked back some of the early weeds popping up in the radicchio plantings. The thing that’s growing better than I’ve ever seen it on the farm are the annual grass weeds so that’s a lot of what we’re knocking back at this point – unfortunately not before it’s created a ton of seed that we’ll be dealing with for a few years in the future.
Cully Neighborhood Farm 