Week 10: Tomatoes!
Tian Tian Farm Newsletter - August 6, 2024
Logistics:
Due to a last-minute travel change, Elizabeth and I will be delivering Ballard boxes to Fair Isle on Wednesday. They will be available for pick-up after 3 p.m. You can still pick-up on Thursday if you’d like at the same time, though we recommend Wednesday pick-up for optimal freshness.
All other shares will be at their usual pick-up spot/time.
This Week’s Share:
Dragon beans or green beans (Wednesday shares) / Pea vines (Thursday)
Unagi cucumber
Sun gold tomatoes
Asian eggplant
Slicing tomato (momotaro or moskvich)
Head lettuce
Amaranth greens
Partially-cured garlic
Perilla leaves
It’s tomato season! This week our tomato hoop house totally transformed into a tomato bounty. Sweet, sweet sun golds are a farmers market staple. You also have a slicer. Moskvich are deep red. The perfect utility tomato. Momotaro are pink or gold. Sweet, plump. It’s said that you can even keep these in your fridge and retain their quality.
Not it’s time for our Wednesday pick-up members to get fresh beans. You either have green beans or dragon beans. Here’s a recipe suggestion for the dragon beans. Here’s a dragon beans recipe.
Amaranth greens quickly became one of our favorite crops to grow. They’re a huge hit with the Chinese and Vietnamese aunties at market. Here’s a good recipe.
We harvested our garlic about a week ago, and all of it is sitting in the barn to cure. Garlic needs about two weeks of heat if you want to store it long-term. So, this garlic would be best used within the next week or two.
Water
To me, the most difficult aspect of farming is making sure that all of our crops get enough water at the right time. Thankfully, we live in a wet climate and source from a well managed by our landlady, meaning we have not been subject to irrigation shut-offs like the farmers out in the Yakima valley this year. Or like farmers in those drought-prone California valleys. Or like farmers dependent on the ever-shrinking Colorado River.
This is not to say that the well won’t ever dry up (it most assuredly will), but up to this point, we’ve received more than enough rainfall in the winter to sustain us through the season. (We actually had a scare in June when the water suddenly stopped running. Mercifully, the culprit turned out to be a broken pump connection that our neighbor, an electrician, was happy to diagnose and fix in exchange for a whole lot of vegetables.)
All of our water lines are connected to one of two spouts on the north and west ends of our farm. All of our water flows through a complex grid of trip hazard hoses and tubing, branching out to (we hope) every one of our crops in the field. We use drip tape for most of our crops. In our opinion, it’s the most efficient application of water. Drip tape’s virtues also comes with many pains. Our system consists of THOUSANDS of feet of tape and we don’t always notice when things go wrong. We often find ourselves overwhelmed by leaks. The tape makes it difficult to weed. Sometimes certain areas don’t receive enough water pressure. Sometimes we’ve placed the tape just slightly off and some transplants don’t receive enough water. Sometimes the tape shifts while its running in the middle of the night (our preferred watering time) and we have to fix it (if we actually notice it).
Occasionally we’ll use sprinklers to water direct-seeded crops. They also come in handy during these hot summer months when our young transplants are extra sensitive and just need a cool-down. We have neglected to use our cool-down method a couple times this season and lost a few beds of greens including our first ever succession of Taiwanese Cabbage, a tragic moment that continues to haunt me as I lay in bed.
‘Til next week,
Steven