Cherry tomatoes and more peppers ripening

The weather has cooled off the past few days but our summer crops are still ripening rapidly!

Every week the cherry tomatoes are producing more and it is exciting to see so much on every plant meaning we don’t have to move as much to fill a basket. The three main varieties we are growing are Sungolds, Sweet 100 and Juliet. We also have a mix that includes purple and pink bumble bee cherries along with a blush variety. They add some really unique colors and shapes to the basket and are delicious!

This past Saturday we were at the Saturday Davis Farmers Market for the first time and it was a great time! Thanks so much to everyone who came out and told people they knew about us, we sold out of tomatoes and lots of other veggies.

We will continue to have more tomatoes at all our markets as the second planting produces more. The heirloom tomatoes are coming in much stronger now from our first planting and they are delicious so we will have a good amount of them at the three markets. Additionally, we are starting to get a few heirloom tomatoes off our second planting which is exciting as that has all our varieties in larger quantities.

This past week marked the end of our chard, kale and collards at market as they were struggling in the heat to produce high quality stems so we mowed them.

Our last carrots until the late fall will be brought to market this week along with the final scallions as we close out our spring crops. We still will have beets for a little bit longer but almost every other spring crop has already been mowed.

The first sweet peppers are starting to turn color and we took a few of them to market on Saturday. We will have lots of Jimmy Nardello peppers in the coming weeks as they are ripening. They are a really nice long red sweet pepper that is delicious to eat raw. The first seeds came to the US in 1887 when Jimmy Nardello’s mother brought them over from Italy. Jimmy Nardello donated some of the seeds to Seed Savers before he died and then in 2005 they were added to the Slow Food Ark of Taste which is a living catalog of delicious and distinctive foods.

In addition to the Jimmy Nardello pepper we are growing shishitos which we’ve been harvesting for a few weeks and a bell pepper that only has green fruit so far. The other varieties we are growing are Gypsy, Pimiento and Lunchbox, which is a great snacking pepper with very few seeds.