Summer is officially here with bountiful summer veggie harvest

All the summer veggies love the warm, long sunny days so they can ripen much quicker and get full of flavor.

Last Friday was Summer Solstice and the longest day of the year which the tomatoes and all other summer crops we grow showed they loved it by many more ripening up.

The harvest of our summer crops increased dramatically last week and at the start of this week by a significant amount with the great weather and more daylight there is.

It can be hard to tell how much the ripening of the tomatoes is speeding up but each time we are picking cherry tomatoes there are a good amount more than the previous time.

The ripening of the first few cherry tomatoes takes some time but now that they are in full production the plants are covered in Sungolds. While harvesting it is easy to tell where we have already picked from a distance as there is no orange on the plants.

With our early planting of Sungolds, they are the variety we have the most of. The Sweet 100s are starting to come in good along with the Juliets while we are seeing the first few baskets of the varieties we put in our mixed baskets.

We are very happy with all the tomatoes ripening so that we can keep the tables filled with them at the farmers markets later into the day and also be able to start supplying the Davis Food Co-op and other wholesale customers starting very soon

The past couple of weeks we have been harvesting a couple handfuls of cherokee purple tomatoes each of our three harvest days.

Already this week we’ve harvested as many cherokee purple as the last week plus we are starting to see a few of the other varieties of heirloom tomatoes ripen.

Mirroring that jump in ripening are the Early Girl tomatoes. We’ve already picked more in one day this week than all of last week. They are perfect to slice up or add to a salad.

The tomatoes are not the only crop that is having lots more to harvest as the eggplant is ramping up in production thanks to one of the varieties we are growing.

The Japanese eggplant has been really productive to start the season and is the majority of what we have harvested so far along with some of the variety of Chinese eggplant we grow while the other varieties have lots of small fruit on them.

A heat wave could knock off the flowers from the eggplants and affect what we can harvest but with there being lots of small eggplants on the plants we will at least have a more consistent harvest for the next few weeks unlike last year,

The first peppers that come in are always the shishitos, since they are small pepper and are harvested when still green. They have looked really good so far and we have picking a good amount for market while waiting for the other peppers to ripen.

This week we are starting to harvest Gypsy peppers which are a great all-around pepper that yellow and ripens to an orange color. They are currently yellow and are great to use just like any bell pepper.

For many of our spring veggies this will be the last week that we are harvesting them. We still will have a few of them that can handle the heat a little bit better but this will be the last of the leafy greens.

In just a few weeks we will be seeding our first fall plantings of leafy greens so it won’t be too long without any.