Veggies bracing for heat wave

The cool weather this past week has been thoroughly enjoyed by our plants and us as we knew the hot weather was coming back soon.

Hopefully this next week will be the hottest stretch of temperatures we get this summer as its forecasted to be above 100 degrees for the next nine days including 110 on Sunday and 113 on Monday.

Since we saw those temperatures on the forecast we have been thinking about how to get as much done as we can before so we are spending the least amount of time we can working in the afternoon heat.

Our first planting of lettuce for the fall is growing really nicely and looks really good after we weeded it. We will likely start harvesting some of the little gems in the next few weeks while the head lettuces will be a little bit further behind.

We’ve been missing lettuce and we get asked at all our markets many times if we have lettuce and when we will have it again.

Another group of crops we are looking forward to harvesting are our bunching greens. The chard is growing fast and the rest of them are a little bit slower but still doing very well.

The crops we direct seeded two Sundays ago are all germinating well including the carrots which are one of the more finicky ones. Just before they germinated we used a flame weeder on the beds of carrots to kill some of the weeds so that the carrots are competing less at the beginning and we hope there are a few less weeds.

Our arugula and radishes are growing rapidly so we should have them soon at the markets. The heat will add a little bit of spiciness to both of them.

While those crops are germinating we just seeded another round of them which we will continue to do all fall.

We brought our first shallots and red onions to the market this past Saturday. The delicate and sweet flavor of the shallots is fantastic and our red onions are smaller than we expected which people like since its easy to use up instead of a large onion.

In the coming weeks we will have leeks at the markets and we are not too far away from sweet potatoes.