Lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, onions, tomatoes, peppers and kale? Kale may or maynot be in the share, it’s not usually great in hot weather but I’m optimistic. Lettuce will probably be more red leaf. Cucumbers, like the summer squash, are waning, but we might get one more week. Sweet peppers are just starting to color up. We only ever put sweet peppers in the CSA shares, although many of those varieties look like they could be a hot pepper. The hot peppers are all in the you pick section for folks who want to add some spice – more on that below. Tomatoes seem to be doing well right now, especially sauce tomatoes which we reserve for the farm stand. The onions will probably be the flat cipolla types. They didn’t do particularly well this summer but we have a few to put in the shares and we’ll have more other types soon.
In the you pick area we have three types of hot pepper: padron, sugar rush peach, and basque. The padron peppers have been going for a while now and they’re picked small and green, getting hotter as they get bigger. They share a row with the sugar rush peach which are a fruity, pale peach colored hot pepper. The basques are in the row next to the cherry tomatoes and those ripen red and are typically dried, but can also be eaten fresh. Also ripe in the you pick area are the first ground cherries. These look like small tomatillos and they fall to the ground when they are fully ripe. We’re experimenting with a few melons in the hoop house this summer. If you buy one and it turns out to not be ripe please let us know and we’ll take it off your account – we’re still figuring out how to judge ripeness on the little watermelons and I suspect we had a few yesterday that weren’t ready yet.
Once again I forgot to take a field photo yesterday, but I have plenty of water meter photos. We track our water use carefully and with all of the heat it’s been even more important this year to be on top of the irrigation schedule for the crops. Yesterday we got a good bit of weeding done and part of that is coordinating where we weed with what irrigations are running. It’s a big puzzle every week figuring out how to fit it all together!
Cully Neighborhood Farm 