June is the eye of the storm between April and May’s frenetic transplanting, weeding, harvesting activities and July, the busiest month of the year when we’re essentially only harvesting (and irrigating). Mothers Day flowers and all the spring lettuce are behind us and we have an avalanche of melons and tomatoes, plus all the other hallmarks of summer, just over the horizon.
This is one of many shoulder seasons that pop up during the course of the year, periods of transition when we’ve got a foot in two seasons at the same time. Just look at this week’s weather: starting the week in the 80s and ending it over 100. Plus the crops we’re harvesting: cooler weather crops like the kale and carrots in your boxes, and hotter weather crops like green beans, summer squash, basil, the first melons, cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes. It’ll be a bit longer before we have enough of these summer crops for the CSA boxes, so for the moment, these small harvests just go to the farmers market, a great place for just a few boxes of this and that. Our CSA boxes reflect what we have in abundance, not necessarily a perfect reflection of everything we’re growing.
Our fields are a mix of still small, neat, well-weeded rows of summer crops and once-neat fields of spring crops that now are picked over, or mowed, except for a few straggler rows and some weeds. The field in the photo above was planted back in late January and looked a lot prettier in March than it does now, but each empty bed reflects a lot of tasty meals that you and others enjoyed.
The days of eating leafy greens are numbered, not to return until fall. We need to get the potatoes out of the ground and into storage before the soil temperatures get too high; it’s better that any roasting or steaming happens in your houses, not in the field. The rush is also on to harvest and sell our delicious carrots before it gets too hot.
Every spring and summer is a little different. This year, almost everything has been two to three weeks early. March was one of the driest we’ve had, coupled with some very high temperatures. Then we had a relatively rainy April and May (including a lot of rain in a short period of time two weeks ago). This all follows a very foggy and cold November that exposed our stone fruit to more chilling hours than usual. We wondered what that would mean for this year’s fruit. Early June report: it’s not a great stone fruit year. What is here is ripening at odd times, and the fruit is oddly shaped. We’ve removed a lot of old peach trees over the past year, so there’s just less to harvest in general. Additionally, some of our apricot varieties didn’t have fruit. Fortunately, we do have Blenheim apricots, though they’re early. They’re usually a mid-June crop, ripening around Father’s Day. The fruit are still tasty but the timing of this spring’s rain has not been kind to them; the recent rain caused a lot of the almost-ripe fruit to split and the earlier rains caused some disease, leading to the speckles and scabs that you see on some of the apricots you’re getting.
What will this summer bring? We shall see…
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
