Tomatoes

We are in a transition week. We have all our summer help back to school and we have a trickle of college students starting to show up.

We have now pulled all the yellow storage onions and have them on wagons or in the greenhouse for curing so they will store for the winter. The red storage onions do not look so great. There is some rot, and some of the beds they grow in are so damp that my foot sinks an inch or two on the pathway.

Lately it’s been either pretty hot or pretty wet (or both), and unfortunately, the ground is still on the damp side for more fall seeding or transplanting.

We are still harvesting tomatoes for this week’s box. The tomatoes outside have peaked, and we are beginning to see the end of some plants. We normally plant tomatoes inside the tunnels, but because of the loss of our second high tunnel, we were unable to do that this year. The high tunnel tomatoes that we were able to plant look like they will last quite a while still. There is no wilt, no cracking, no disease present in those as there is in the outside tomatoes.

We have not dug potatoes now for two weeks, which feels really odd. I hope to put a crew of students together in the next week or two to dig as much as we can of what is left. The timing of the spring rain and the location of the potatoes combined for a less-than-average yield this year. We will be looking for improvement there next year.

–John Wesselius