Melons and summer solstice
Over the last several weeks we have begun harvesting the delicious flavors of summer and with summer officially here the quantities are rapidly increasing.
Sometimes it feels like summer starts early on the farm with the occasional hot stretch in May and almost all of our focus on the summer crops.
Sunday was Summer Solstice and the longest day of the year which means that there is no slowing down on the farm with the harvest of all the summer crops.
The long sunny days we are having is helping all the summer crops ripen at a quicker pace than they were just a few weeks ago. We can see the ripening speeding up with every harvest of the tomatoes and melons.
Last year we didn’t start harvesting melons until July and we’ve already been picking the first few for the last two weeks.
After the changes we made this year to how we grow melons by transplanting them instead of direct seeding it already looks like it has been am improvement. The plants look much healthier and are growing very quickly.
Each of the rows is full of plants and the vines are spreading out over the open ground covered in flowers while reducing the amount of sunlight that the weeds need to grow.
We are growing a number of different varieties of melons with some of them being better early in season and others better later on.
Mainly we are growing cantaloupe melons and the two varieties we are harvesting now are Goddess and Divergent. They are both exceptionally sweet and aromatic with orange flesh.
We are also growing Galia melons which are a soft green fleshed melons that is very sweet. The rind turns mostly a greenish yellow when it gets ripe.
There are two varieties of Sharlynn melons we are growing as the main one we grew the previous years the seed was unavailable. The first one we are harvesting is San Juan which is a more round variety with a creamy soft inside that has a sweet and tropical fruit flavor.
Joining the melons in picking up in ripening are the tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes continue to increase their ripening every harvest by a good amount which is awesome to see.
The sungolds are coming in very strong along with the sweet 100s while the mixed varieties are starting to ripen.
We even are starting to get a decent amount of early girls and heirloom tomatoes. They always take a little longer to ripen but when they start to ripen it won’t be long before we have a bounty of them.
In addition to the melons and tomatoes we have started to harvest the shishito peppers.
Always the first pepper ready, the shishitos are a perfect appetizer or snack. They can be just tossed in a hot pan with oil for a couple of minutes and then eaten still hot.
Many varieties of shishitos have a small chance of being spicy but ours do not. They have been selected to not have that spiciness.
Hopefully we will be picking some of other peppers shortly. The peppers are green and just need to ripen.
