Peppers, Eggplant, Cucumbers and last week of lettuce

The summer crops keep on rolling in as the days get hotter including our first heirloom tomatoes!

We took our first cucumbers to last Thursday’s Benicia Farmers Market and we should have plenty more this week and in the coming weeks. The Davis Farmers Market got our first eggplant last week which was mainly a globe variety and we will have more this week including of other varieties.

We have a lot of peppers on the plants but still have to wait a little bit before they start coloring up. One pepper that we can start harvesting is shishito peppers as they are eaten when they are green, they are delicious to toss in a pan with some oil and blister them before adding a pinch of salt. We should have a few of them at the Davis Farmers Market today and more coming soon.

Another crop that is flourishing right now are the green beans with the plants full of perfectly ripe beans. We hand pick them which takes much longer but gives us the best possible beans to sell and we can harvest multiple times off the same plant. We just seeded a couple more beds if green beans so we can have a continuous supply of them.

One major spring crop that is coming to a finale this week is lettuce with the last of it going to the markets this week. We are very happy to be having lettuce this far into June after we had a hot few days almost a month ago and then last Friday it got to 104 degrees.

We still have a few spring crops we are harvesting including carrots, beets, chard, kale, scallions and fennel which over the next few weeks we will finish harvesting them.

In addition to lots of harvesting we have spent a lot of time over the last week weeding lots of our summer crops and mowing down areas where we had spring crops.

A week and a half ago we planted some sweet potato slips and we are very excited to see new growth coming off the slips. Initially after planting the slips appear like they are dying but they actually are focusing on growing roots which is what has been happening and the new leaves are the sign of that.