As spring has turned to summer and the occasionally very humid weather that accompanies it, two problems have arisen--heat and excess moisture. As I mentioned last week, warm air has the capacity to hold more water than cold air, so when warm air is saturated with water as happens most nights, the dews are especially heavy and the mesclun especially wet. While we like to harvest when it's coolest, we're learning that we do need to let the sun rise higher in the sky and allow the warmer temperatures to dry off the mesclun before harvest. It's a fine balancing act. If we wait too long, the mesclun gets too hot and dry in the midday sun, in which case it promptly wilts upon harvest. Consider also that we need to look at kale, lettuce, chard, and other greens in the same way, and you can see the challenge of harvesting summer greens for maximum quality and shelf life. Between harvest timing and leaving bins open/cracked in the cooler for some time after harvest (as mentioned in last week's newsletter), we're working to maximize crop quality. All this is another reason why summer is the most challenging time of year to grow cool loving crops in the Midwest. All the heat and moisture are as much as hindrance as they are a help.

Finally, with regard to mesclun, we're being more careful how we cut it, both in terms of its age and even more in terms of the height at which we cut it. I don't mind cutting mesclun a little older and bigger than is normally done, but we need to be careful to cut it higher and avoid too many stringy stems when we do so. Going forward, we're going to try to do two things. First, we will cut mesclun shorter a lot of the time. If that isn't possible (due to stormy weather or very wet ground or very hot weather) we'll cut it higher to reduce the number/quantity of stems. Mesclun is not a crop I've grown extensively in the past, and we're growing a lot more of it now, so we'll focus on all these issues until we gain the skills and experience necessary to do it well. I've gotten lucky a few times in the past and had it turn out very well. Now we'll pay as much attention to it as necessary to have consistently higher mesclun quality and shelf life.

The above considerations are part of why we pack boxes over value, and have most of the year. As we work to expand our crop variety and grow more greens in summer, we know there will be occasional quality issues associated with our learning curve. I promise that we will learn fast and implement changes as necessary. Please keep comments coming, as they help us a lot in knowing where and when to improve. Until we're closer to perfect, we'll continue to pack boxes 10-20% over value to insure a fair value of good, usable produce. At that point, we'll continue to pack 5-10% over value--because we'll never be perfect.

The early summer contents of the box are holding steady with warm weather crops just coming on. The new additions this week are tomatoes--slicers for the Solo shares and our tasty sun gold cherry tomatoes in the larger sizes. We'll wait another week or so for basil. Talk about a crop that has issues with being harvested wet--basil is the worst. If we left anywhere near as much water on the harvested basil leaves as we have on some mesclun harvests, it would be ruined overnight. This will really force us to face the issue and get it right!