Beginning to harvest melons and peppers

The calendar turning to July gave the signal to the remaining summer crops that were not ready to start ripening quickly.

This past week we picked the first melons of the season and had the first large harvest of peppers that were not shishitos.

All of our cucumbers and melons are planted in the same area so we’ve been eyeing the melons while harvesting cucumbers to see when they would finally ripen.

Luckily it was not just one variety of melons that ripened at once as we had Galia and three different varieties of cantaloupe at market last Saturday.

The varieties of melons we will have every week will depend on what is ripening as we have a few successions of each one spread throughout the season.

This week we started harvesting the watermelons and will have some at the market today. We are growing red seeded watermelons since they have such a delicious flavor.

The first pepper we start harvesting is always the shishitos since they are small and picked green. All the other peppers are much larger and best harvested once they starts showing at least some of their final color.

The Gypsy pepper is a great all-around variety that turns orange when fully ripe and we grow a few bell peppers that are good for being stuffed or cut up.

Out of all the peppers the largest number of plants we grow are the Jimmy Nardellos. They are a delicious frying pepper that is sweet and can be used in almost any dish.

Some people mistake them for a spicy pepper but they are the furthest from that.

It also looks like we will be able to start harvesting the Lunchbox peppers for this weekend as they have finally started to ripen. They have very few seeds so perfect to snack on raw or just cook them whole.

While the harvests of the peppers, melons, tomatoes, eggplant and other summer crops are getting larger every week we are also thinking ahead to the fall.

Right now we are planning what we are growing in the fall and ordering seeds since it is only a few weeks until we begin seeding in the greenhouse.

Everything we plant in the fall will also carry us through the winter so it is important to plant enough and we have been looking back at our notes to see what changes we should make for this fall.