Observing Tomato Maturity & Transplanting for Summer

Village Farm Team,

Did you get a chance to make it out to the veggie wagon on Saturday to load up on summer squash? If not don’t worry because we’re harvesting nearly daily at this point to keep up with our plants! One of the first summer squash varieties to mature this season was “Zephyr” and we’ve quickly fallen in love with it. Zephyr is similar in appearance to a standard yellow summer squash except for the characteristic band of light green at the blossom end. And, we’ve even harvested some that have the green band on the stem end as well. This squash is tender with a nutty and almost sweet flavor. It’s perfect both for raw and cooked applications in the kitchen.

Our tomatoes appear to have been slowed down a bit by the cooler weather we had last week. We’re still harvesting small amounts of our delicious and vigorously growing Sungolds with Juliets and Indigo Cherry Drops maturing very soon. As for our larger varieties, they’ve still got quite a bit of time left on the vine. Juliet is a plum tomato variety that is deep red when ripe. They have a rich and balanced flavor, sort of like what you think of when you imagine the quintessential tomato. They are just as delicious in salads as they are made into pasta sauces and salsas.

We did quite a bit of planting over the past week! We planted three rows of sweet potato slips, both the Beauregard and Georgia Jet varieties. These will spend a good bit of time in the ground before being harvested later in the summer in July/August. We also transplanted our watermelons and muskmelons which will most likely start to mature in about two months. To make sure we have plenty of options to choose from to pair with our tomatoes, we also transplanted several varieties of basil into our raised beds: Prospera, Thai, Purple, Cinnamon, and Lemon.