Tomato season is upon us, and melon season nearly so!

The melon and squash jungle

Well, we are fully into the swing of things for the season.  Our kitchen table has been inundated with tomatoes and cukes.  We have been selling our produce at the farmer's market for 4 weeks in a row with very good results.  Our little business looks to have great promise!  And it isn't without joy.  Every Saturday morning we look forward to the day's market and every Saturday afternoon we comment on how much we enjoyed ourselves.  So cheers to both you and us for making this such a positive experience.

The unexpected cool August weather slowed down the ripening process for our main crops, but they are now coming along nicely with the current warm temps. 

We are getting many ripe tomatoes.  The varieties that we've harvested and will be selling this coming weekend are as follows:

Cherokee Purple
Rutgers
Black Krim
Super Sioux

Desert King Watermelon

The watermelons are not quite ripe, but they are certainly numerous.  Hopefully they ripen soon and we can start bringing them to the market.  Our yellow fleshed Desert King water melons really love hot weather, and heat also contributes to their sweetness, so we'll be watching the weather reports and hoping for the hot stuff.

Buttercup Squash

Butternut Squash

It also won't be long until we have squash.  We have two varieties, Buttercup and Butternut.  I can't tell you how many times we've said one and meant the other.  The Buttercups are very sweet and smell almost like a cantaloupe when you cut them open.  The Butternuts are more nutty, as their name implies, and not as sweet.  Our personal favorite is the Buttercup, but taste is relative and many people prefer Butternut.  To each their own, we say!

Orange Bell Pepper

Our peppers have also been producing.  We sold some green bell peppers and gypsy peppers over the last few weeks, and our colored sweet bells are just starting to color up, so we're almost at peak pepper production time.  We have a ton of peppers on the plants and should be well stocked with them at future markets.  We really love making stuffed peppers or just chopping peppers and freezing them for later use in things like chili and fajitas, so we'll have a fortunate dilemma in deciding how many to sell and how many to keep.