Brief weather change as summer veggie harvest increases

The long days of sunlight and temperatures in the high 80s took a brief pause yesterday afternoon for an unexpected hour-long rain storm.

The surprise rain ended up being over an eighth of an inch and soaked the ground pretty well even with May being a pretty month.

Throughout Tuesday we got a couple of drizzles from the cloudy weather and did not expect anything more as it was not forecasted to occur in the days before.

We even were running the irrigation as some veggies needed some water after a weekend of warm and sunny temperatures. Of course the rain came right around the same time the irrigation for the day wrapped up but it was still very beneficial.

No complaints about rain here especially since we normally never get any in May here, especially in the last week of the month.

Over the next few days all the plants will take in all the rain through their roots to propel their growth.

The top of the soil is already drying out since the water infiltrates so well and by going lower in the soil the water is protected from evaporation and easily accessible for the roots to take up

Today we are at the Wednesday Davis Farmers Market and tomorrow we will be attending the Marin Civic Center Farmers Market. It is located in San Rafael and goes from 8-1 pm with a lot of great farmers.

We will have almost all the same veggies at that market except for a few that we have to reserve to supply both Davis markets. We didn’t get approved for the Marin market until March which is late for planting spring crops with the time it takes for them to grow before it gets too hot.

Fortunately we already were planning to increase our summer production by a good amount so we will have lots of summer veggies for all of the markets.

This week we transplanted the last big succession of tomatoes across the two veggie properties and it was 2,800 tomato plants. It is a wide mix of heirlooms and cherry tomatoes.

We have picked the first handful of cherry tomatoes but need more to come in before we even fill one basket.

Right now we have lots of putting in stakes and stringing tomatoes to keep them growing upwards.

In addition to the tomatoes we have been planting lots of melons, watermelons, cucumbers and green beans.

All of those have many successions that will hopefully be ready every few weeks overlapping just enough to keep us picking a consistent amount.

For this weekend we may even have the first couple of handfuls of green beans while at the same time we are picking lots of broccoli and cauliflower.

With all those new plants in the ground it will mean a lot more weeding to come along with all the summer veggies we have planted that were not getting any water in their pathways until this rain.

Irrigating with drip tape means the soil in between the beds of plants dries up more on the surface since the drip tape soaks down right around the plant.

When using sprinklers it waters the whole of the area which leads to more weeds but it a quicker way to get a lot of water on the plants.

So lots more weeding to do along with all the harvest.