Marketing!

Starting next week I will be selling at the Orange County Farmer's Market in Hillsborough.
CSA deliveries may need to move to Tuesday.

What a fruitful week! I am now hunting for a second fridge so I can store the abundance that I expect will be coming for the next couple of months.

Our first melons are only two weeks away according to Karen McAdams, one of the Cooperative Extension agents who have put together the incubator program. As long as I keep the plants somewhat weeded it looks like we’ll be eating lots of watermelons and muskmelons (the group of melons to which cantaloupe and honeydew belong). This week we had a bumper crop of cucumbers. The rains were apparently well timed. Of course the squash are still coming on. We also have our first tomatoes ripening. I just stumbled upon the eggplant. I hadn’t even notice flowers on the plants and all of a sudden there were fruits.

Also lots of weeds.

Rain

The rain this week was a very welcome respite from the drought that was as recently as last Wednesday classified as severe by official sources. It was a relief to farmers including those of as at the incubator farm who irrigate out of ponds. We had begun to see the water level of our pond lower over the past few weeks. Most plants seem to do better with a periodic rain in addition to just being irrigated.

That said, the weather and I are not in lockstep. The heavy inundation every evening several days in a row made the ground to wet to till when I had the chance. I am running out of room for the next succession of plantings and I had hoped to open up more space. This will have to wait a little while longer.