January and February without rain brings May showers…. is that how it goes?

Yesterday as we were harvesting for the Capay Valley Farm Shop we had a downpour for 10 minutes with a little bit of hail and then it lightly rained over the next few hours. It was fun harvesting in the rain and pulling these beautiful crops like the potatoes out of the ground. The actual amount of rain we got on the rain gauge was around a tenth of an inch which isn’t much but we will take any rain we can get. After the next couple of days of cool weather it will warm up with the temperatures reaching 90 this weekend.

This week we will have the first potatoes at market which is very exciting for us. They are super delicious new potatoes so their skin has not set yet and can be rubbed off. They are a white potato called Sifra and we have been enjoying them steamed with some butter!

Also at the market we will have some spring onions, these are delicious sweet onions we planted back in December and they are sizing up a lot so they will only be making an appearance at market for a short time.

The third new crop we will have at both the Davis and Benicia markets this week are beets! At first we will just have round red beets but soon we will also have cylindrical beets that are the best for slicing.

Over the weekend we were able to put the tposts in for our second planting of tomatoes which is also our largest. The plants are growing very fast and need to be trellised so the first step was to put the posts in.

When we put the first string on the second planting of tomatoes we will put a third string on the first tomatoes. The first tomatoes have already started setting fruit and have lots of flowers on them.

We planted our second planting of basil in the field before the rain and at the same time we got our third planting seeded in the greenhouse. Our first basil is coming on nicely and we may even have a little bit at market this week!