Staking Tomatoes and first summer crops coming soon

Tomatoes are one of our main crops and there are many good reasons for that including that we love to grow and eat them.

Everyone loves the delicious flavor of the tomatoes, especially from this area which is the perfect climate for them. A crazy statistic is that over 41 thousand acres of processing tomatoes were grown in Solano and Yolo County in 2021 without taking into consideration all the tomatoes for eating fresh that are grown here.

We’ve been spending a lot more time focusing on the tomatoes these past few weeks including weeding the rows and staking the tomatoes.

All of our tomatoes are indeterminate so we need to trellis them so we are able to continue to harvest them without scrounging through plants laying on the ground.

The first step was to put in metal stakes throughout every row and we then will put string up. About every week we will add another string higher up to continue to train the plants upwards.

We’ve seen the first tiny fruits on a plant and some flowers so we will see when we have tomatoes ready to harvest starting with our cherry tomatoes.

There are some changes to the Davis Farmers Market today and for all Wednesday markets through September 13 with the time of the market moving to 4-8 p.m. from 3-7 p.m. That is happening with the return of Picnic in the Park this week after a few year hiatus which will have music and many more vendors.

All of our veggies are growing well in the warmer weather including our spring crops with some standouts being our lettuce, bok choy, turnips and kale.

We aren’t that far away from having our first summer crop which is our summer squash. One of our varieties we are growing has small fruits on it that are growing pretty fast with this warm weather.

Once our summer squash starts producing they will keep producing at a rapid rate.

Another summer veggie that is growing fast and we will soon start harvesting is our basil, specifically the Italian Genovese variety. Last year we already were harvesting basil at this point but of course with the cooler spring it is delayed this year.

Flea beetles love to eat the leaves of our eggplant and so we covered them in some netting for the past few weeks hoping to minimize the impact of the flea beetles. The netting had some holes in it so there is some damage but the eggplant has grown very quickly and looks to be stronger plants at this point than last year.

Under the cover in addition to the eggplants growing well the weeds also loved the environment so we had to give those beds a weeding which makes them look so much better and hopefully help the eggplant grow even better.