First tomatoes & green beans at market!!!

Tomato season is officially upon us! After harvesting our first cherry tomatoes last week, our first slicers are ready to harvest.

The variety that is ripening is Early Girls which is a smaller slicing tomato and super popular. We picked our first ones over the weekend and tasted them Sunday at our weekly dinner with our mom and grandma who both gave them top marks.

Green beans will make their debut at both farmers markets this week. They are very delicious and we enjoyed the ones we tried in the field.

This week we will have a few more pints of cherry tomatoes at the markets, mostly Sungolds and Sweet 100s but possibly a few Juliets which are slightly larger red grape-like tomato.

Lots of our time this past week has been spent weeding our crops and that has been more enjoyable with the cooler temperatures we have been having. It is forecasted to be 76 degrees on Saturday before climbing again to 100 by the end of the next week.

A bird or other animal got into our greenhouse a week ago and chomped on most of our basil we had in there. We thought it might be able to bounce back but most of the seedling had their growing tips eaten so they could not develop mature leaves. That left us with no other choice than to plant a new succession which will be a few weeks later but much better than running out of basil late in the summer.

We have been seen lots of flowers on our eggplants, cucumbers and peppers which is a very exciting sign of all the fruit to come from those plants. The Japanese variety of eggplant we grow already has a few that are ready to eat which our mom took and a miniature variety we are growing has some close to ready for harvest.

The hot spell last week was not enjoyed by any of our spring crops but the final two plantings of lettuce did grow a lot through the heat with lots of water. They are starting to be ready to harvest this week and we will probably have lettuce for another two or three weeks depending on if we harvest it all or it bolts in the heat first.

We have been taking fresh yellow onions to market for the past few weeks and now have started to harvest our red onions to allow them to cure so that they can be stored. They are a flatter red onion, Early Red Burger and should be at the markets in a few weeks!