Welcome to the Summer Share! What can you expect over the coming weeks? We still have some of our “cool season” crops out in the field including cabbage, carrots, beets, and a whole lot of potatoes. Fingers crossed we get a good potato harvest this year. We have just started harvesting squash, and hopefully cucumbers will be ready soon, too. A little later on you can expect tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and basil. Expect a lot of tomatoes. What’s the point of summer if not to grow bushels and bushels of tomatoes?
We’ve also just planted watermelon and cantaloupe, and late summer will bring long beans and butternut squash as well. We will do our absolute best to grow you an abundance of beautiful and delicious summer vegetables. Wish us luck, because that plays an important role, too!
Every year is different. This year we have had the fortune of a long, cool spring. Extra good news because we doubled the size of our spring carrot planting. Thanks to the weather, the kale, collards and chard still look good. We have, however, had the misfortune of unprecedented pest pressure. As I have already mentioned in a previous newsletter, cucumber beetles destroyed our first planting of squash. The second succession of squash is looking better, and we just tucked the third round of squash and zucchini plants into the ground. It is coming, just a little later than usual. Ditto the eggplant. Flea beetles have really taken their toll on the first planting of eggplant. Eggplant is usually such as easy crop for us. Plant it, walk away, come back in six weeks and pick eggplant kind of easy. We will have eggplant. Just not as early as we usually do.
It’s not just cucumber beetles and flea beetles. Never have I ever seen so many Colorado Potato Beetles as I have seen on our potatoes this year. Apparently 2021 is The Year of the Beetle, at least here at Tubby Creek Farm. Hopefully the beneficial lady bugs (also a beetle) are doing equally as well.
We make plans, and then we bend when nothing goes according to plan. This week we had the foresight to do almost all of our Tuesday harvesting on Monday since the forecast called for rain. And how it did rain! We weren’t able to finish harvest on Tuesday, so we had to change what I had planned to put in the shares this week according to what we already had harvested. Rain is good for farmers. right? Yes, but you can have too much of a good thing. And then you can have way, way too much of a good thing!
Thank you to all our CSA members for trusting us to grow your food. Here’s to an abundant, unpredictable summer.
Small Share
- Savoy Cabbage
- Carrots
- onions
- Kohlrabi
- Mini head lettuce
Full Shares
- Beets
- Assorted squash
- Savoy Cabbage
- Carrots
- onions
- Mini head lettuce
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