Okra is loving the heat

The summer is a time when not too many crops can grow in the hot weather here without lots of extra effort to keep them cool and shaded and we have talked about most of our summer crops except for one.

We are growing okra which is an uncommon crop for this area that has some people who love it and most who have not tried it. The most common okra is green but we are also growing a red variety which loses most of its color when cooked.

Before the pod of okra forms on the plant a gorgeous flower emerges, which is shown in the picture. The plants grow so quickly in the heat and the pods can get tough once they reach a certain size so we are harvesting three times a week to keep them tender.

It has been nice to have a break from planting in the field after such a rush in April and May but we did plant a bed of Genovese basil this past Sunday. It is our fourth and final planting of the year of basil which should be ready in around a month or a little bit longer. Having the multiple plantings allows us to harvest the basil from a planting and then let it regrow while we harvest the next planting.

There is something so special about fresh basil and lots of people at the market have been grabbing some basil and tomatoes to make a caprese salad recently.

People are also making a lot of gazpacho with our tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and onions for all these hot days when a chilled soup is really nice.

Work in the greenhouse is starting to pick back up and more of the tables are filling up as we planted our second fall succession of lettuce on Sunday. We are planting lettuce in the greenhouse every two weeks and later in the year we will plant it more often in larger quantities to keep harvesting throughout the winter.

Figuring out how much lettuce to plant in the late fall so we still have some in the early spring is a challenge as the lettuce we seed in January won’t be ready until April.

The onions we planted in March are ready to harvest and cure so we begun harvesting the yellow onions on Monday. When they are ready to harvest the tops of them fall over and almost all of the tops have fallen over. While harvest about one-third of the yellow onions we noticed they were an even size and there weren’t many that were too big. Once we finish pulling the onions out of the field we will get to work on the shallots which are a few days behind and look really nice.