A sweet, sweet taste of summer
When we sit in front of the computer in December planning out our summer crops there are certain ones we want to be ready by specific dates.
For tomatoes it is about the third week of May for cherry and start of June for Early Girls. Melons we aim to be harvesting a good amount by the end of June.
Fourth of July is circled on our calendar for when we would like to have watermelons and sweet corn ready by.
And this year we have achieved that as we are starting to harvest our first sweet corn this week along with the first watermelons for the weekend.
In past years tomatoes, basil and melons have been our key summer crops with sweet corn being the exciting new addition this year.
Without this larger property we began leasing last year we would not be planting any sweet corn. To get pollinated sweet corn uses the wind and the best way to have successful pollination is to plant in blocks.
For us that means we plant four rows of the same variety of corn at the same time to get that pollination.
About every two weeks you have to plant sweet corn in order to have consistent harvest so on a small piece of land sweet corn would take up way too much space.
Luckily on the larger piece of land sweet corn is much more manageable especially with a tractor doing the planting and cultivating. The only hand work we have to do is harvest the sweet corn.
We tried growing sweet corn last year and the best part of it was we learned a lot about what changes we needed to make as we only had enough ears for ourselves.
This year we’ve made some improvements with a lot more necessary for next year’s sweet corn and every crop we are growing.
Saturday is July 4th and we will be at the Davis Farmers Market like normal with lots of summer veggies for the holiday. It may be a little bit more difficult to find parking downtown as the Davis Bike Club Fourth of July Criterium will be taking place between F & C Streets and 4th and 2nd Streets.
For the Marin Farmers Market tomorrow the market is moving for just this week to the Northgate Mall in front of Macy’s because the Marin County Fair is taking place at the normal location this week.
Watermelon is not something we grow a lot of but each year we are planting a little bit more since they are so delicious.
This Saturday we will start having a handful of watermelons at the market of two different red seeded varieties. One of them is a ‘small’ round watermelon that usually is over five pounds called Sugar Baby and the other is Dark Belle, a football shaped one that has a thin skin and a fantastic juicy sweetness.
The challenge of watermelon is that they are very challenging to tell when they are truly ripe. There are lots of tricks to figure out which is the best but none of them works perfectly and you always have to cut one open to do some quality control.
In addition to the watermelons we will have lots of musk melons as more varieties keep on ripening each week.
The last two weeks we have been harvesting shishito peppers and this week we will start harvesting the first of the larger peppers. They Gypsy peppers are a great all-around pepper that is yellow right now and will ripen to orange over time.
While yellow they are less sweet but very flavor and can be added to any dish.
