Harvesting cherry tomatoes

A couple of weeks ago we were scrounging for the very first few cherry tomatoes and in the last week there has been a explosion in ripening.

It is so exciting to see all the color pop up just above the ground on the plants that keep getting taller and flowering even more.

Starting to harvest a good amount tomatoes feels like the start of summer to us with the hot days and hours each week spent picking tomatoes.

Over the last few weeks everyone has been itching to know when we would have the cherry tomatoes and we are glad to be able to have a decent amount at the markets this week.

We are nowhere near peak production as only the first planting has ripe cherry tomatoes on it but in short order the next ones will be coming in.

The main cherry tomato we are harvesting is the crowd-favorite sungold for its sweet burst of flavor when popped in the mouth. We have planted double the amount of sungolds as any other variety so hopefully we can have enough for everyone.

To complement the sungold we are growing Sweet 100s which are a delicious red cherry tomato with more of a tomato taste than the sungold. They are also the perfect size to just pop in the mouth and eat whole.

This year we added a number of new varieties of cherry tomatoes that we will mostly be mixing all together in the mixed baskets. Often the mixed baskets ended up being mostly one variety as that was the one we had a lot of so hopefully with the more varieties each basket can have lots of colors and shapes.

After harvesting all season long we will figure out which of the new varieties of cherry tomatoes we want to continue growing and if they are good enough to replace the ones we have been growing.

We don’t track the exact harvest by variety but picking them twice a week we are able to get a sense of what varieties we prefer and then more importantly which ones everybody that gets of at market likes.

The early girls are coming in slowly and hopefully soon there will be a good jump in ripening.

The last few weeks we have been harvesting green beans and this week we will start picking the Romano Beans. They are an Italian flat bean that is very flavorful and can be eaten raw or cooked in a wide variety of dishes.

Because of their meatiness they can be added to soups and other long cooking dishes without the same worry as green beans of being overcooked.

While we are excited about all these delicious summer crops coming in, it is also the end of the season for almost all of the spring crops over the next couple of weeks.

For some of them we are running out of what we planted for this spring and for others they have or are soon to succumb to the constant stress of the heat.

Luckily it will not be too long until we have most of the spring crops as we will plant them again in the fall. In a month we will be seeding them in the greenhouse and then in late August transplanting and direct seeding them.