Trying to stay ahead of all the growing veggies

May is always a very busy time on the farm with all the spring veggies being ready to be harvested before it gets too hot and almost all the summer crops in the ground growing fast with the rising temperatures.

There always are a litany of tasks to do on the farm but prioritizing them to stay ahead with what matters the most is crucial. Some tasks even though we would like to get them done get pushed back since they don’t have as negative of an impact by being delayed while others do.

One of the big tasks we have been doing is trellising the tomatoes with a string to keep them growing more upwards instead of all over the place. We have to stay on top of when the next string is needed with the cherry tomatoes growing faster than the heirlooms.

If we let them just grow on the ground it would be much harder to harvest and lots of tomatoes would go bad from sitting on the soil as they ripen.

While putting the string on the tomatoes we noticed the first two sungolds almost fully ripe. Hopefully many more follow in the coming days as there is lots of green fruit on the sungolds along with the Early Girls and Cherokee Purple in the first planting.

All the other summer crops have been getting lots of attention with watering and weeding. They are growing very quickly and we are seeing lots of flowers along with a few of the tiniest summer squash.

There is less time being spent weeding the spring veggies as most of them are getting close to harvest and if they are not the leaves have already grown large enough that it is blocking out the sun from the weeds right below them so they grow much slower.

Planting successions of the same crop every couple of weeks we hope to have a consistent harvest but with the warm and sunny days there have been everything is growing much faster. With the harvests being close together for some of the crops we aren’t able to always wait until the veggie is the perfect size, instead picking it a little early so it doesn’t go bad before our next time we are harvesting.

We are harvesting our first two plantings of broccoli and the third planting is already starting to have some small heads. With the warm weather it doesn’t take long for them to get to the size we want to harvest them at and before they go bad.

Last week we started to harvest some of the small green cabbages we have and soon we should be starting to harvest the cone cabbages. They are dense but still small so another few days or a week and the first ones will be picked.

Tomorrow is a big planting day on the farm with our last main succession of tomatoes going into the ground. We have a small fifth planting that will be planted at the start of June but it only has a two varieties while this one has all the ones we grow.

The first flowers we planting are starting to get a few blooms although the stems are short and we are planting the next succession of them tomorrow.

Next week we have our last eggplant and peppers to transplant along with the one planting of leeks which will begin to be harvested in the fall.

The greenhouse will be practically empty next week with those crops planted along with more basil. We have another succession of basil to plant in the greenhouse but after that nothing until July when we start with fall crops.

Some of the basil was under row cover and it has grown much quicker than the basil not covered and we should be beginning to harvest the first few bunches soon.