It's the time of year when many cooler weather crops are hanging on if we do a good job watering them and if it's not too hot, and when summer crops are coming on. Expect new and lots of items in the box now through summer.

Speaking of summer crops, we had intended to include cabbage, potatoes, and onions in the box this week, but for a couple reasons decided not to. We have another week's worth of cabbage, but having included it just last week, we figured a break would be good. On the potato front, they would be new and fun in the box now, but they would take a long time to wash by hand, and we have a new $5,000 root crop (barrel/drum) washer on order that should be here in a week or two. We can reduce potato washing time from several hours to less than one hour by simply waiting for the barrel washer! We don't have any extra time or energy on our hands these days, so it seems best to wait for the washer.

Tomato harvesting is picking up, so everyone will see lots of these over the next two+ months. We do our best to distribute small (cherry and Juliet), plum, and large fruited (slicers) varieties over time, and amongst the different share sizes. Round, red, slicing tomatoes will make up the majority of what we offer--about half to two-thirds of the tomatoes you'll get. Zucchini is hanging on well enough and will be in the box again this week and next, and probably not after that as the plants will get tired and old after a month of production. Eggplant is right around the corner, and peppers not far behind that. 

Greens (including lettuce) do best in cooler weather, so are a bit difficult in summer, and we struggled in the heat last week establishing new beds of lettuce, cabbage, chard, mesclun and kale. Between the flea beetles, which can be voracious in hot weather, and the several 90 degree days we had in a row, our plantings suffered and we lost many plants in our newly transplanted beds. We were able to replace many of the lost plants. The good news is that we've got a couple good looking, young mesclun beds that will be ready to cut later this week. The temperatures will be a little cooler for harvesting, and we'll work on harvesting it on the younger side. We'll get a good chance to get the harvest size, cutting height, and post-harvesting variables worked out. If we really get it right, we'll cut the mesclun first young and very short, and then cut it again a week to ten days later, slightly higher than we did the first time. The leaves from the second harvest will be a little bigger than from the first, but not much bigger, and we'll work to cut it high enough the second time around that you'll not be bothered by unnecessarily long, stringy stems.

Despite the challenges of the summer heat, we'll keep working at it to reach our goal of always having at least some greens in the box year round. Out of our 42 delivery weeks per year, we strive to have greens in every one of them!