Things seem to be settling down with respect to heat and drought. Though we haven't had the soaking rains Chicago has seen, we're actually almost 'normal' for rainfall over the last few weeks, and we've had several periods when moving irrigation pipe was not necessary. This week we're having the same sort of perfect and moderate weather we experienced this past April and May during which we had beautiful, plentiful crops--especially greens. The good news is that we have been sowing seed and transplanting through the heat (like you paid us to do), and now we've got several successions of nice looking lettuce, broccoli, and other Asian greens that should do well with the settled weather.

We did pretty well with the heat, and know we could have done better. It's nice for us to know most other farms/CSAs struggled too, and that we did a better job of maintaining crop quality and plant health than most. To be sure, I've gotten pretty sick of hearing from, and reading about, farms that identify themselves as victims of the drought, which is 'killing their crops.' A few farms have even dropped their CSA customers altogether, chalking it up to 'the risks of farming that we all take.' And one of these farms then turned around and took their produce to the farmers' market the following week-an interesting marketing strategy to say the least!

Well, it almost never rains in California in the summer, they often get well into the 90's, and they grow more food than most countries. Stability and knowing what to expect are nice, but as farmers, we need to be aware of the potential for change in climate, and prepared for the extremes we should expect to encounter. Personal responsibility, self-insurance, and awareness of the climatic conditions on which crops depend are some of the best qualities any farmer can have. Many small vegetable farms are run by people who are less than 100% dedicated to growing food (they and/or their spouses have other jobs/sources of income), and whose awareness of climatic history/change/potential is limited

A perfect tomato!

to what popular culture and social norms tell them. Those are among the farms complaining about the weather, asking for help and more money, skipping weeks, and even dropping their CSA customers completely mid-season.

We're heavy into solanaceous (tomato family--including peppers, eggplants, potatoes, and tomatillos) crops now, with all five of them currently being harvested here. You'll see lots of three of them, and a lot less of the other two. Tomatoes are doing great, so expect them for at least the next six weeks. We're taking a break from small fruit this week, so you'll see slicers or roma/plum types if there aren't enough slicers to go around. Eggplant are doing okay despite still being chewed up heavily by potato beetle larvae (see the photos in last week's newsletter). Peppers are doing well despite being blown over by a big wind gust in a recent thunderstorm. You'll see sweet peppers and just a few hot Serrano peppers this week; they're about the size of a pinky--don't blink or you'll miss them.

Potatoes and tomatillos aren't doing as well. We have harvested some tomatillos, but they're slow and small. I always think of them as heat loving like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, but thinking back to our best tomatillo years, which were cool, I realize I may be wrong. As we need tomatillos for our processing kitchen, and most people don't love them, we don't expect to have them in the box this year. Potatoes for sure like cooler weather, so that's enough to explain the lousy harvest we're experiencing there. Probably a good thing we lost two-thirds of our potato crop early in the year to other causes. It would have wasted lots of resources taking care of three times more potatoes than we did, and then have them yield so poorly. We will have enough for one week, and that will probably be in a few weeks, or whenever we have time to wash them.

Otherwise, we're getting back into greens, starting with the easier, somewhat heat tolerant, ones. Our second planting of kale has finally grown out of the heavy flea beetle damage it experienced after transplanting, during some of the hottest weather of the year. It's amazing and a great example of what I mean when I say 'just keep planting and things will work out.' It's got a few holes, but as always, they're free and totally safe. The box is rounded out by garlic and onions, which turned out to be our most solid crop of the year. Despite lots of insect pressure, we managed to pull off a great onion crop with decent yield and very high quality. We sprayed and weeded and irrigated them like crazy, and though we could have had twice the harvest in a perfect year, what we got is very solid and free from the thrip damage we had the past few years.