Finding a turtle in the tomatoes

Yes, you read that right. We had a turtle on the farm and we saw it Monday amongst a row of tomatoes.

The turtle is a long-time resident of the farm living in the pond that is on the property. The last time we saw it was last fall as it doesn’t emerge from the pond often.

I guess the cool and cloudy weather we had encouraged it to go on an adventure into our tomato plants.

The tomatoes have been a focus of our work over the last week along with our excitement seeing a few start to ripen.

Last Thursday we found our first ripe cherry tomatoes and they were Sungolds. They tasted very good and we are excited to be harvesting lots of them.

After seeing those first few ripe cherry tomatoes we have seen a few more and that should increase in the coming days.

All of our heirlooms and Early Girls have some decent size tomatoes on them and the plants are continuing to grow in size. Hopefully in the next few weeks we will start to see those tomatoes start to ripen.

Right across from our tomatoes we have our eggplant and peppers along with our basil. We are starting to see small fruit on our Japanese eggplant and our Shishito peppers have their first fruit on them along with lots of flowers.

Over the next few weeks there will be a switch from spring crops to all of our summer veggies and it is already starting.

We were able to bring a handful of cucumbers to the market Saturday and we will have lots more from now on. Our striped armenian and slicing cucumbers will be the majority of what we have with our suyo long variety a little bit behind.

The striped armenian cucumbers definitely don’t need to be peeled before eating and I don’t peel the slicing cucumbers before eating but you definitely can peel them.

About two weeks ago we direct seeded all three varieties of winter squash we are growing and over the past few days the seeds have been germinating and growing.

We will harvest them in September and after a few weeks of curing in the field bring them to market.