With the solstice this past Wednesday, it’s officially summer. But without the calendar reminder, you’d be forgiven for not realizing. We’re due for some classic June Yolo County heat later this week, but so far, it’s been remarkably temperate and cool, only in the 80s, and slightly brisk in the morning, chilly enough to wear a sweatshirt or vest.
But if you look a little closer, the signs are there that we’re in summer mode, or at least gearing up for summer, even if it’s been a slow start.
We’ve been checking all the summer crops frequently for progress and if you look closely and lift up a few leaves, you can find yourself a few small, beautiful eggplants, the first peppers, plus the cherry tomatoes I mentioned last week.
We’ve harvested our first melons! We don’t have enough for the CSA just yet, but we will soon, and we usually are able to include them through September, probably later. We just received a giant order of boxes for wholesale melon orders and while 2023 hasn’t been a normal year so far, if our melon season is anything like it’s been the past few years, we’ll make a sizable dent in that supply of boxes by the end of the summer.
If you peek inside the wreath room, you’ll see that it’s full of drying flowers that we’ll use for stunning wreaths and dried flower bunches in the fall. The wreath room is so full that we’re also using a greenhouse covered with shade cloth to dry more.
In the kitchen, they’re still making carrot teacakes, though the end of carrot season is rapidly approaching, and they’ve started making zucchini tea cakes, drying summer stone fruit, and making jam.
And the biggest, not subtle at all, sign of impending summer is the shade cloth going up over the pepper field. It’s the latest we’ve put it up, and seemed less windy than usual. This cloth helps protect the peppers from the fierce summer heat, reducing the number of sunburnt, unsellable peppers. It’s a true labor of love to cover all two acres – if you want a deeper dive into the process of getting it set up, you can get that here.
So, summer is here, even if it hasn’t quite felt like it yet. Happy summer everyone!
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
