Greetings!

Happy 4th of July! It may feel like spring this week, but summer's starting at Touch the Earth Farm, and we're gearing up for some delicious summer harvest.

This week, I've made the images over there in the sidebar clickable, so go ahead and click them for a larger view.

In this week's market bag:

• black seeded simpson lettuce
• oakleaf lettuce or green curly leaf lettuce
• baby romaine
• red salad bowl lettuce
• costata zucchini
• chioggia beets
• horseradish greens
• "City Lights" Swiss Chard
• citrus thyme
• thyme
• rosemary
• tarragon
• dill
• basil
• flat parsley
• cilantro
• purly chives and garlic chives
• 1/2 pint of red raspberries or mixed red/black raspberries

Business:

Double-breasted chicken: Broilers will be available for purchase, pick up or delivery with shares next week. We have very few left, so be sure to get one before they're gone. Cost is $3.00/ lb, likely dressing out at about 4-5 lbs.

Duck: Pasture-raised duck will be available for Wednesday delivery of next week or pick up thereafter. Cost is $7.00/ lb likely dressing out around 3 lbs.

All these birds have been pasture-raised with only natural feed free of hormones, antibiotics, and animal byproducts and finished out on organic grains from Nature's Best.

News:

Well, the rain situation is not improving, and this week, I've begun irrigating the tomatoes. Without a steady supply of water, the plants will quickly wilt and the fruit will become cracked and deformed. The good news is that this year, the tomatoes are up in our kitchen garden, giving them some respite from the harsh afternoon sun and making irrigation easier for us, drawing from both harvested water and the farm water supply.

Everyone received a tomato teaser in this week's market bag: four Gold Nugget tomatoes, our early cherry variety. The Sungolds should soon follow, and our Brandywine slicing tomatoes and fancy Green Zebras are growing large on the vines now. We'll also have two varieties of paste tomatoes, a German strawberry tomato hopefully good for stuffing as an appetizer, and a grape tomato that's to die for as a sundried tomato—loaded with concentrated summer flavor in the middle of winter.

Our first beans should be ready for harvest very soon, so look for Royal Burgandy beans in your bags next week. For those with kids, I call these "magic beans," and though they're a hybrid variety, no garden for children should be without them: they go from a beautiful shade of purple when picked to a lovely green when cooked. Have your kids help prepare these beauties, and they're sure to at least taste their vegetables.

While our summer melons have several flowers, they're stubbornly resisting setting fruit, though male flowers are said to develop first. Our winter squash—pumpkin, butternut, and acorn—have all begun setting fruit and growing nicely.

Happenings:

I'm continually amazed by how quickly things can ripen on the vine—literally in a single day it seems, often making me long for the capacity to create time-lapsed videos just to watch them as they grow.

Of course, other things—those we're really looking forward to like melons or sweet corn—can often seem excruciatingly slow. Ears on the first planting of corn are growing, and we're eagerly anticipating the beginning of corn and potato season by the first week of August.

Which brings me around to the concept of succession planting. Some plants, like raspberries and blackberries, have a season over which we have little control other than planting different varieties that mature at slightly different times. Last week was the height of raspberry season, and everyone received one and half pints. This week it's tapering off a bit, so this week it was half a pint. Raspberries will soon give way to blackberries, just as the stawberries gave way to raspberries.

Other plants, however, we try to manage and prolong availability by "succession planting," which means we plant smaller batches 2-4 weeks apart. This way we won't be overwhelmed by too many maturing all at once, and we'll prolong the season as each subsequent planting matures.

Over the past two weeks, I've planted more watermelons, more beans, more zucchini, more lettuce, more green onions, and more peppers. I've also planted yellow squash, calendula, borage, and sunflowers. Some of these are a gamble on having an Indian summer while the lettuce is a gamble that the heat-tolerant varieties and shade cloth will be a successful combination. But in farming, pretty much everything has some element of luck to it—the key is to be in the position to take advantage when the conditions present themselves.

Pitch In!

Don't forget, we recycle used pulp egg cartons, so please return them rather than throwing them away. While Maryland law doesn't allow us to reuse egg cartons for our eggs, we can use them for making homemade paper. Thanks to all who've brought theirs in!

Happy Eating!

Danielle at Touch the Earth Farm