For most of the time plants don’t like the heat but when tomatoes, melons and a few others are ripening they enjoy the heat which ripens them up quicker.

This long heatwave that hopefully will be over by the weekend with only one day under 100 degrees in the last week has sped up the ripening on many of the summer crops.

A tomato that might have been a week or two away from being ripe instead is ripe now with the heatwave. For the melons and tomatoes there are lots of them coming in all at once.

Up until the heatwave started the Marvel Stripe tomatoes were ripening slowly and we were just harvesting a few at a time. But once the hot weather started so many of them started to be ready to harvest in quick succession.

It is one of our favorite tomatoes for its gorgeous color and sweet flavor it has. Plus it doesn’t get very watery so it hold together well when sliced up.

At market it is the variety we can’t keep stocked on the table with people grabbing them just after we set them down.

There is something about yellow and red striped tomatoes that people love and outside of the beauty it is the sweeter flavor they have since they typically have less acid than a red tomatoes. It is also why Sungold cherry tomatoes taste so sweet.

This year we are growing much more melons than last year’s test and a few more varieties which are all starting to come in now.

We have Cantaloupes with their orange flesh along with Galia melons that are extremely fragrant and have a sweet green flesh. The Sharlynn melons are football shaped and have a soft flesh that is a mixture of white and orange.

We also had a few watermelons at the farmers market this past Saturday and will have some more this upcoming Saturday. There is only one variety of watermelon we grow right now and its a delicious red seeded variety.

Just this past Friday we started harvesting the first Jimmy Nardello peppers of the season to go along with some Bell peppers and Gypsy peppers. The Shishito peppers are a great size to be blistered and then eaten immediately as a snacl with some olive oil and salt on them.

Peppers need a little bit more heat to grow so we typically start harvesting them after most of the other summer crops and hopefully lots more peppers will ripen thanks to the heatwave.

The heatwave did do some damage to the flowers that were forming on the tomatoes and eggplants which we won’t see the effect from until August when we might have a dip in harvest due to fewer flowers that turned into fruit.