Good week!
It’s hot, hot, hot …. 🙂 Together with the rays of heat, we also get tons of vitamin D and other positive things in the summer. But there are also those who do not enjoy it. It is the common abundance / shortage dichotomy.
To illustrate, despite the importance of the sun’s rays, have you ever tried to stand outside for a whole day in this weather?
The tomatoes and gourds are doing very well now and you can see it in quantity and variety. This is the time to make pasta sauce, matbucha, sundried tomatoes, etc. The amount of tomatoes actually warrants it J And remember what fun it is to open a jar of pre-prepared pasta sauce, made from sweet summer tomatoes or a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in the winter, the season of greens and roots.
In the gourd department, some are in abundance and are enjoying the summer and some are really in short supply. The "winter squash" is now dominant and now is the time to load up on them. The winter squash is the gourd that is harvested at an advanced stage of maturity, when the peel has hardened to protect the fleshy inside and the mature seeds (which can start the next generation). Among these you can find plenty of chestnut pumpkin, Japanese pumpkin and butternut squash. There is no need to use them immediately.
Now they are available in a multitude of shapes, sizes, colors and flavors and we cannot store the quantities required for the entire season for all of us, simply because we do not have enough space. You do not need to store them in any special way – a decorative basket in the living room or on the kitchen counter will give them the dry and airy conditions that they need and you can enjoy them for another two months. In the meantime, they will decorate your house J. You could wipe the dust off them occasionally…
“Summer squash” – the dark and light zucchini, cucumber and the melons, are in the opposite state: The heat of a few weeks ago caused the majority of the flowers to fall off. The fruit develops from the flower, so if there is no flower, there is no fruit. The heat really "burned" cucumber bushes and now they are slowly recovering. New crop cycles are growing and will soon complete the shortage, but in the meantime the shortage of cucumbers is felt throughout the country, especially in the organic crops. I hope that the heat load will allow them to grow quickly and return to the quantities of cucumbers that we are accustomed to quickly!
The greens and the roots simply suffer in such dry and hot weather. Almost all the leaves prefer winter, spring and fall. They literally burn from the strong sun. Their color can turn yellowish while they’re still growing in the garden. The length and width of the leaves gets smaller. The dryness of the air makes them less juicy and the heat makes them more bitter. My family eats a lot of romaine lettuce in large Caesar salads during our family meals – so we suffer during this season.
In addition, all this stress makes them rush to bloom, because they sense that they will not survive and that they need to hurry before the weather kills them to put the next generation on the line. This flowering causes a shorter season, so the picking needs to be earlier and the leaves change accordingly.
So, although it is not the leafy season, of course we still grow them and you get them fresh, but take all this into account and be a bit patient J. Soon the weather will change and they'll be back to being what we want them to be.
Have a Good and seasonal week!
For health!
Yours, Maggie and the garden team
In our organic vegetable baskets, we can expect:
Thai spinach
Thai green beans
Tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes
pumpkin
Eggplant
Japanese pumpkin
Kale?
basil
Onions
In the larger organic vegetable baskets, also:
corn
Mint
Potatoes
Organic fruit baskets:
Pears in transition
Israeli Gala apples in transition
In the large organic fruit baskets, also:
Green grapes
Apples Gala – More
