What a joy it is to receive rain after what felt like the start of summer with temperatures reaching 90 degrees and high winds that dried everything out even more.

The farm received half an inch of rain early Saturday morning in a storm that quickly went through the area. Cooler weather followed the rain which has been very nice for all the crops, especially the spring crops and recently planted ones.

Hoping it was going to rain Saturday we decided to transplant our main planting of tomatoes for the year on Friday. It is over double our first and third plantings and features a number of more varieties. We were able to plant full beds of more varieties instead of half beds and also got to plant two beds of mixed cherry tomatoes which has four varieties in it.

We also were able to transplant our first cucumbers and okra into the ground. Both of those crops will also be direct seeded in their next plantings but by starting them in trays we will hopefully be able to harvest earlier in the summer.

Every week the number of crops left in the greenhouse is reducing as more final plantings of crops are going out into the field. We have one planting of lettuce left after transplanting our penultimate one Tuesday and getting the final onions and shallots into the ground. The second planting of basil is growing in the greenhouse along with leeks and in a few weeks we will seed more trays of basil but nothing else needs to be seeded in the greenhouse.

The last few weeks we have been direct seeding green beans, Romano beans and okra outside. In the coming weeks we will direct seed cucumbers, more okra, more beans and winter squash.

For the Davis Farmers’ Market today we will have lots more sugar snap peas, arugula along with all the crops that were there last week including Dino and Red Russian Kale.

Having seen the first planting of tomatoes grow so rapidly we realized it was time to start staking them before they were leaning over too far. We first pounded in the stakes by hand and then put a string up along the plants to guide them upwards instead of becoming a bush. It is one of the key tasks for growing tomatoes so that they are easy to harvest from and the fruit doesn’t get ruined sitting on the dirt.