The spring veggies are showing off in this weather

After the early spring rain followed by the sunny and warm days everywhere we look there is lusciousness and colorful veggies.

The chard, kale and collards that we planted in early February have been growing every day and making it easy to harvest them since they are not feeling very stressed.

Being able to harvest four or five stems of similar size from one plant and knowing that in two weeks the plant will be ready to harvest again makes it much easier to determine how much we can pick with more coming soon.

Having these bunching greens being ready to harvest at this time is very important as the overwintered ones are all flowering and stressed out.

Next week, April 23, we will start back at the Wednesday Davis Farmers Market. The hours will be 3-6 pm and then beginning May 7 it will switch to 4-8 pm with Picnic in the Park starting up.

We are also starting to harvest some of the lettuce we planted in February while still getting the last of the good ones from the overwintered plantings. We added a few new varieties of lettuce while getting rid of some as we try to find the ones that grow and taste the best.

After the heat last September caused an entire planting of spinach to not germinate we decided to seed carrots in that area in late October unsure of if we would get any from them.

Fortunately we are harvesting a good amount from that planting and that experiment is working out so well we will be intentionally planting some carrots much later to have fresh ones at this time.

The carrots we seeded at the end of January are growing really well but still a little ways away.

While we harvest all the spring crops we are keeping one eye on the summer crops that we’ve got in the ground and the growth we are seeing from them.

The tomatoes seemingly are growing a couple of inches every day having them tucked under a row cover to protect them from the colder weather and wind, but today we are taking it off and trellising them.

The first few flowers are opening and should be becoming fruits soon which is very exciting for everyone as we are all excitedly anticipating the first tomatoes of 2025.

Before we start harvesting the tomatoes we will begin harvesting the potatoes and they have grown a lot from last week to this week. Yesterday we went through with the tractor with shovels attached to it to move soil onto the plants to hill them and kill the weeds.

We haven’t noticed any flowers forming but they are not far away and soon after that we will be harvesting new potatoes.