tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes

Small Shares

• Red Pontiac Potatoes
• Red Onions
• Assorted Sweet Peppers
• Slicing Tomato
• Heirloom Tomato

Full Shares

• Red Pontiac Potatoes
• Red Onions
• Assorted Sweet Peppers
• Slicing Tomato
• Heirloom Tomato
• Juliet Plum Tomato
• Red Cherry Tomato

This week it’s all about tomatoes!  You do like tomatoes, right?  The tomatoes planted in the high tunnel were supposed to be ready a few weeks ahead of the tomatoes in the field.  That way we’d have a nice, steady supply starting in early June.  This plan worked perfectly last year!  But every year is different, and this year the high tunnel tomatoes and the first planting of field tomatoes are happening ALL AT ONCE.  The crew picked tomatoes all morning yesterday.  That’s about 12 hours of tomato picking.  Did we finish?  No.  There are still more tomatoes.  How am I supposed to get anything else done when there are all these tomatoes to pick?  And they just keep ripening!

I love tomatoes.  I love growing tomatoes, I love eating tomatoes, I love sharing the taste of real tomatoes with all our CSA members and farmers market customers.  They are an important crop for us, we are busiest at the market during tomato season.  But boy howdy are they a lot of work.

Buried Treasure

Tomatoes aren’t the only thing we are harvesting.  We are about 2/3rds of the way through the potato patch.  The potatoes have done really well this year.  I think they appreciated the cooler-than-normal June we just had.  Potatoes are a bit tricky.  You can’t plant them too early, because the soil has to be warm enough for them to come up.  But then they stop forming tubers once the soil gets too warm.  In this climate, that leaves a pretty small window for growing potatoes.  It was a good year for potatoes, at least for us, and we managed not to mess that up.   Buried treasure may conjure up images of chests of gold coins for many, but I picture bushels of potatoes rolling out of the ground behind the tractor.  French fries for days!

You can’t win them all.

The onions were a bit of a bust this year.  They just didn’t grow well, and we only ended up harvesting about a quarter of what we planted.  I honestly don’t know why.  Better luck next time.  I am embarrassed to say, we also had a hard time with carrots this spring.  Not an all-out crop failure, but pretty close.  I am embarrassed because carrots are my thing.  I am the Queen of the Carrots.  The Carrot Whisperer.  Well not this year.  First, the seeds did not germinate well.  Then the weeds took over.  The good news is that just a month from now, at the beginning of August, I’ll get a chance to redeem myself.

That’s right, summer has just begun and now fall planting is right around the corner!  (Who is panicking?  I’m not panicking!)  I have already started seeds for broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.  We are constantly looking months and months ahead.  The work just keeps coming, and we have got to stay on top of it or we will be in trouble down the line.  Like a gerbil on one of those stationary exercise wheels, I am running and running and running but there is no forward motion.  I can’t get to the next thing on my list because I never finish picking those blessed tomatoes.

Welcome to farming in July.