Delicious and exciting flowers all over the farm

The farm has seen so many flowers blooming over the last week with all the warm and sunny weather there has been.

Some of the flowers will be harvested to eat and others will be pollinated to create delicious summer crops.

The part of the broccoli we eat is the flower part of the plant along with some of the stem. Over the last week lots of broccoli has grown rapidly and we are starting to harvest it today with lots more ready Saturday and in the coming weeks.

There are a number of varieties of broccoli that we grow so that we can have a more consistent harvest. The earliest variety has a smaller crown than the later ones which size up in the extreme they have to grow before being ready to harvest.

The broccolini plants first grow a smaller main head that gets harvested and signals for the plant to start producing the side shoots. Those side shoots grow very quickly and are super tender in the stem.

The potato plants have been doing a lot of growing over the past few weeks and when we were hilling them yesterday we noticed the first few flowers on the plants.

They have been putting all their energy into growing as plants but once they flower the focus of the energy turns to growing the potatoes. They are really small right now and with this weather plus some water we may be able to harvest the first ones in a couple of weeks.

During Picnic in the Park the hours for the Wednesday Davis Farmers Market are 4-8 pm. That starts today and goes through September. There will be live music every week so come enjoy a great evening in Central Park and grab a few veggies to tide you over until Saturday.

It feels like it is early to be thinking about melons but we have got the first flowers on a few of the plants.

These melons were transplanted instead of direct seeded, all others were direct seeded, and got an additional head start by being under row cover up until now keeping them slightly warmer and protected from the wind.

Now having the row cover off is important so that the bees can begin to pollinate the flowers each plant produces.

Last week we mentioned that we had the first fruit on our sungold cherry tomatoes and now we have lots more flowers plus some trusses with flowers starting to develop.

There are a few flowers on the Early Girl tomatoes but most exciting is that we saw the first early girl tomato on one of the plants!

To help the plants get all the nutrients and water possible we have been doing a lot of weeding to remove the competition.