4th of July Week...

This week was the week of the storm. It blew through on Friday night, and I spent the whole time watching my newly built hoop house, full of all of my cucumber and melon babies, through the window, praying that the wind wouldn’t pick it up up and away.  Surprisingly, considering the strength of the wind, there was no mangled steel.  Overall I did not get too much damage; the eggplant and peppers all fell down, but they didn’t snap so I staked them back up on Saturday morning and all but one seem to be doing fine. The haricovert beans that I am currently harvesting were blown down to the ground with no real solution, the plants seem ok for the most part, but having to pick through the tangled mess adds quite a bit to the harvest time. The biggest loss was the currant tomatoes, though they didn’t die completely, a lot of the major branches snapped.  I fixed some with duct tape (yes you can do that) and those seem to be holding well. So in the end I think I made out pretty well considering the severity of the storm.  Our new scare crow, the “scary crow” was also knocked down, but not damaged so we will have him back up in a few days. He is a monstrosity of a scare crow in the form of a giant bird with an 8 ft wing span, made from grape vine, moss and of course, straw.  Gregory, the florist here at The Inn and myself spent several late evenings last week constructing and installing him, and we are both pretty proud of what came out of it.

It is really hot again this week, but we are still in the realm of good growing weather, I have been keeping up with the irrigation so everything is happy.  The latest generation of beans, carrots and beets are starting to pop up.  I am planting the second to last generation of summer squash this week, and the second generation of cucumbers are almost ready to move into the hoop house. The romanesco, and cauliflower have all popped in the green house, so it is starting to look like fall in there (as long as you can ignore the 110 degree temperatures). The cherry tomatoes have out grown their 6 foot stakes, so I will have to come up with a plan to extend them this week, it is hard to know how high they will go considering we just hit July! 

The harvest list grew quite a bit in the last week.  We finally have our own shishito peppers, a beautiful little pepper from Japan with a complex, slightly bitter flavor. There are lots of green bell peppers as well but I will wait for them to ripen before I begin to pick them, when ripe they will come in red, orange and yellow.  Slicing tomatoes are beginning to roll in though right now we are still waiting for the red varieties. (those varieties that are yellow and orange have a tendancy to come in first, even though one of the red varieties boasts a shorter “days to harvest”) The cherry tomatoes are starting to come in strong, and we are even getting eggplant.  All of the above are about three weeks earlier than last year and I am not complaining. Hope you all have a great up coming week, sorry for the lack of photos, but my internet is still down, I’ll add extra next week.