Week 7

We delivered the last of the snap peas to the Co-op Sunday morning.  It was a good run.  In fact it has been a fantastic season so far.  Our stand sales are up significantly as is our whole sale.  It feels great.  Well, until I look at the tomatoes in our greenhouse on South Bay Road.  We have tomatoes in two spots and until a few weeks ago I was so excited about the ones on South Bay.  They have thick stalks and are loaded with fruit.  The ones on Shincke Road looked far less robust but it can all change in an instant.  We just noticed some of the tomatoes at South Bay appear to have some sort of disease.  We will send one off to WSU for testing tomorrow.  Really, tomato disease two years in a row?  Have you ever been sick and looked at the Internet and self diagnosed yourself with some sort of rare, incurable disease?  You can get the same kind of paranoia looking up plant diseases on the Internet.  If my Internet diagnosis is correct we are going to loose a lot of the plants.  Suddenly, I am thankful for our okay looking tomatoes at Shincke and thankful we didn't have all our tomatoes planted in one spot.   We tried grafting a few tomatoes this spring.  It is similar to grafting apples.  You use a root stock that is vigorous and has good disease resistance and then you use a tomato that makes delicious tomatoes for the the top.  The seed for the rootstock was pricey so I didn't do very many and then we had a few die due to inexperience.  We ended up planting out only about eight plants at South Bay.  It will be interesting to see how they fare.  

The other two crops we had trouble with last year were garlic and potatoes.  All of our garlic is out and hanging and we are really happy with it.  You have potatoes in your boxes today and so far so good other than the fact that the deer are eating the heck out of the plants.  Potatoes usually don't take a turn for the worse until they get a bit more mature so we are keeping our fingers crossed.  These are considered new potatoes and have a thin skin.  You don't need to peel them and they taste great no matter how you cook them.  Feel free to keep it simple, they are delicious steamed and cook quickly.  They won't store so cook them up soon.

Carrots - Purple Haze
Potatoes 
Zucchini/Summer Squash
Tropea Onions - Italian sweet onion that has a torpedo shape
Cherry Tomatoes
Broccoli
Lettuce - Small Only
Red Cabbage - Large Only
Salad Mix - Large Only
Slicing Tomato - Large Only