Staking tomatoes and preparing to harvest them

With the sunny weather and warming up temperatures everyone is feeling like the start of summer is coming and they all are wondering one thing.

How are the tomatoes growing and when will we have the first ones at the farmers market?

The tomatoes are growing really well and we have been giving them lots of attention so that we can hopefully have a very good harvest from them.

After planting them we have been weeding them often to remove the competition for water and nutrients along with putting up stakes to trellis the plants.

Once the stakes are in, we run string tightly around both sides of the stakes to keep the plants growing upwards instead of their natural instinct which is to grow like a bush.

Every week we are having to put a string around the plants at a higher point with how much they are growing.

The main reason we trellis the tomatoes to have them grow upwards is for the ease of harvest since it would take so much time to lift up each plant and look through it to see if there is anything ripe to pick.

Additionally, by keeping the plants off the ground we are preventing the tomatoes from rotting which happens when they are touching the soil for too long as they ripen.

We have already started to harvest a minuscule amount of tomatoes, both the Sungolds and Early Girls. They are coming in slow, but very delicious, and hopefully we have a big spike in ripening the next few days or next week.

Both those varieties are filled with green fruit and flowers which is a very good sign for the coming month as long as they ripen.

It is a little surprising to have Early Girls already fully red as that is usually at the start of June but we are happy to have the first ones coming in earlier.

Three of the four plantings of tomatoes we have in the ground have been staked and trellised. The fourth just got planted a couple a weeks ago so in the next two weeks we will stake those as well.

It will be exciting to have the tomato harvest be fully in the swing of things to complement the basil that we already are harvesting lots of.

We have been harvesting the Genovese Basil the last couple weeks and just started harvesting the Thai Basil. We changed varieties for this year as the previously two years it went to flower when it was very small and fortunately this variety has not had that happen.

While there is lots of basil and potatoes to harvest, we are seeing the first of a few other crops like summer squash and cucumbers.

They have had many flowers on them over the past few weeks and the baby fruit is now starting to grow really well that we might have a handful at market this week.

After the couple of days with heat and getting irrigated really well we should see them be producing many before too long.

The melons we don’t expect to be ready until July and we saw a good amount of small fruit on them when we weeded them yesterday.