*Morgan, Grace, and Cindy thinning carrots, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have summer squash, zucchini, carrots, radishes, salad turnips, broccoli, garlic scapes, scallions, baby kale mix, baby bok choi, green curly kale, lacinato kale, spinach, baby lettuce, pea shoots, basil, cilantro, and mini romaine heads.

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Farm News

(Optional bonus reading)

We are excited to have our first harvest of outdoor carrots this week… as well as a good round of broccoli, and the first basil tops. There have been a few early season crop flops this year that are easy for us to dwell on. As farmers, we tend to focus a bit more about the things that aren’t ready “on time” or experienced a crop failure, more than the things that are producing well. We are bummed this year’s tunnel cucumbers didn’t outcompete the cucumber beetles, and we are hopeful the next planting does better. (Looks great so far!) But we are excited the trial of growing a variety of sprouting broccoli that was supposed to produce nicer, consistent shoots with higher yields than the normal spring broccoli heads, which almost always produce poorly quality broccoli in the spring. So that’s been an early season win, and we’re excited to have a lot of this wonderful broccoli available this week! The stems are particularly sweet and tender compared to normal broccoli heads. I am also personally delighted that Ryan has really focused on managing the flow of variety selection to have spinach available nearly year round. (We used to quit growing spinach from May through September because it can be tricky without the right varieties, but I am grateful to enjoy a fresh spinach salad in July.) Our garlic is smaller than we would like so far, but the scallions are an exciting, hefty delight. I am constantly trying to make sure I celebrate the things that are growing well, even while noting what flopped to address future fixes.

We released beneficial insects to prey upon the aphids in the tomatoes instead of attempting to use an organic spray. Spraying any organic pest control can be tricky, not effective enough, and also take out important insects we want present for jobs like pollination, so it’s really a last resort around here. Fingers crossed we have some hungry beneficial insects to take on the aphids. Aphids produce the problem of spreading disease through the tomato plants, so it’s important to jump on them now.

The team caught up with a tremendous amount of mulching and weeding this week. Despite it being hot and hard as a farmer, it’s so effective to tackle weeding projects on those very hot, sunny days so that things quickly die, versus re-root. It’s hard to work in, but those hot days can be good for the garden.

More seeds (lettuce, zucchini, broccoli) were planted in the prop house for later season transplanting. And many more transplants (fall cabbage and brussels sprouts) were put out in the field.