July July

Well, it’s been a doozy of a summer so far. I thought I’d write a quick update during what we call our summer “transition season”. This is the time when our spring crops start to fade away like the salad greens, radishes, and kales while we are still waiting for our summer crops to ripen in abundance. This season we are especially struggling with heat and drought. Our crew has been amazing through temps in the nineties since mid-June but it is hard on the body to be out day after day in the heat and humidity. We start early in the morning and end work by early afternoon to try and stay cool and our crew have been true heroes working through the heat with positivity and good humor. Our running joke being “Estas disfrutando la nieve hoy?” “Are you enjoying the snow today?”

Lettuce has been especially hard to keep happy and growing but we have found that many of our crops are growing more slowly in the heat. If we have limited quantities available it’s because while irrigation keeps our crops alive it is nothing like rain to keep them growing quickly. We hope that tomatoes, eggplant and peppers will be ripening in bountiful quantities and we won’t even notice a few weeks without tons of lettuce and greens. Our cucumber experiment in the high tunnel was a total bust - bacterial wilt found them even under cover (see photo)! But potatoes are growing nicely, our garlic harvest was stellar, flowers are blooming, tomatoes are getting taller and taller!

It’s also time to start planting fall crops and so in between harvests and weeding we will be putting a new season’s vegetables into the ground in the next few weeks. Oh July, you’re a busy time.

We hope you are enjoying your share, as always please email us with any feedback good or bad, we love hearing from you!

All our best from your sweaty farmers,

Malaika, Breezy, Sam, Tammy, Anna, Juan and Martin