Fresh Lavender and summer is here

Growing up the first smell that signaled that summer was here or just around the corner was the French lavender on our family’s farm.

Our parents planted lavender at around the time we were born so we’ve spent our whole lives surrounded by it and appreciating how incredible lavender is.

Now we have our own lavender and are beginning to harvest it today for the Wednesday Davis Farmers Market.

The variety we have is Grosso, which is a terrible name for the incredible plant it is and how fragrant the flowers are. Most often it is distilled into an oil and used to make perfumes but the flowers bloom for a long period which makes it perfect to enjoy fresh.

The lavender is on a new property that we just started leasing this spring after the landlord approached us and it was an opportunity we could not pass up. Lavender takes up just a small part of this new property and we’ve been doing a lot of work on the rest of it which we will talk about more as we get closer to harvesting veggies from it.

May ended with the first days of the year in the triple digits and luckily it has cooled off a few degrees but it is staying in the 90s which means that summer is here.

Summer officially starts in a few weeks with Summer Solstice but with the weather and the crops we are harvesting now it is already summer on the farm.

On Saturday we had the first of the summer squash at the farmers market and what we have been harvesting has dramatically increased in the last couple of days with the heat and being watered.

We grow four different types of summer squash with the green zucchini, zephyr which are yellow with light-green on one end, magda is a pale-green blocky fruit and costata romanesco is gray-green with prominent ribs.

All of them are delicious and can be used together or separate. They are all different sizes, shapes and colors so there is one that can work in any dish.

The tomatoes are starting to ripen quicker although it will be a few weeks until we have a good amount of them.

We even found a ripe heirloom tomato on one of the plants so we are not far off from starting to harvest them as well.

The heat did cause a little bit of damage to the delicate flowers on summer crops like peppers and eggplant but not too much since it was only two days above 100. We have seen a few small eggplants and there are a handful of green peppers appearing.

Over the next few weeks we will hopefully start to harvest eggplant while peppers will probably be the start of July, other than shishitos which might be a little bit sooner.

To help keep cool in the hot weather we are starting to harvest all three of the cucumber varieties we grow. Most of what we grow is the Striped Armenian and they are perfect to snack on due to them not needing to be peeled.

While the summer crops are mostly thriving with the warm weather, the spring crops are showing a few signs of being stressed out by the heat.

Over the next few weeks we will be wrapping up harvesting any greens and as we run out of other crops like carrots which we have run out of in the field.