Welcome to the 2023 Summer Share

Welcome to the 2023 Summer Share!  While summer doesn’t officially start until June 21st, it has sure been feeling like summer on the farm.  The weather has been hot and dry.  Early summer crops like squash and cucumbers are ripening, and I picked a couple tomatoes out of the high tunnel.  Everyone has been getting acclimated to working in the heat again.  Yesterday Nathan, Roger and I put shade cloth on the greenhouse and double-bay high tunnel.  It was getting really uncomfortable to work in either space.

This week we have celery!  Celery takes a lot of patience.  We started this celery in the greenhouse in mid January.  You can expect this celery to be stronger in flavor compared to grocery store celery.  Next week you can expect potatoes and carrots in the shares and at the market.

The year of the cucumber

I love cucumbers.  To me, a fresh cucumber tastes more like summer than anything else.  Except maybe a watermelon.  But I’ve never had a knack for growing cucumbers.   Now that we have high

tunnels with enough structural support, we’ve been able to experiment with overhead trellising.  I decided that this year would be the year of the cucumber!  I have devoted almost a whole high tunnel to cucumbers.  The first succession has been producing for a couple of weeks.  Anna just trellised the second succession as it had started to run.  And the third succession is just coming up in the greenhouse.  Cucumbers all summer long!

So far so good in the cucumber tunnel.  I can see why some growers like doing cucumbers in this system.  The fruit is straight and free of blemishes, it is easy to pick, and it produces a lot of cucumbers!  And I can see why some growers don’t like growing cucumbers like this.  It’s a ton of extra work.  Cucumbers grow fast and require constant trellising and pruning.  Field cucumbers you just pop in the ground, walk away, and come back a few weeks later to pick.

I have noticed a few striped cucumber beetles.   These pests are a real pain, not because they damage the fruit, which they do, but because they spread bacterial wilt.  This disease will cause a whole plant, looking fine one day, to be completely wilted the next.  The only thing to do about bacterial wilt is to prevent it.  And to prevent it you have to control the cucumber beetles that spread the disease.  So now that they are here, it’s time to start carefully spraying a broad spectrum organic-approved insecticide.  Fingers crossed we can keep them at bay.

Small Shares

• Cucumbers
• Squash
• Zucchini
• Onions
• Celery
• Beets

Full Shares

• Cucumbers
• Squash
• Zucchini
• Onions
• Celery
• Beets
• Red cabbage
• Kale