Each year, we grow most of the same vegetables, tweaking the relative amounts of each based on our sales and customer feedback from the year before. Sometimes we will drop or add something - for instance, we used to grow several varieties of heirloom eggplant, but we found that the vast majority of people preferred the plain old purple kind, so for the past few years we've just grown those. We also do some tweaking at the level of variety to figure out which purple eggplant or red tomato or green zucchini grows the best in our soil and under the conditions we use.

To be a good commercial variety, a plant must balance a number of factors, and to some degree it is a zero-sum game - plants only have access to so much energy and nutrition, and so great gains in one area almost always mean a loss elsewhere.  A good zucchini, for instance, is a combination of factors like volume of production, rate of growth, uniformity of color and shape of fruit, disease resistance, and of course flavor. There are some relatively minor considerations as well - do the leaves grow upright so it's easier to see the fruit, or do they flop around? How spiny is the plant (and therefore, how uncomfortable will it be to harvest)? Finding the right balance is a challenge for the plant breeder as well as the farmer!

This year there are a couple of new varieties we've been really pleased with. One is the yellow zucchini "Golden Glory," which has been a stellar producer and impressed us with its gorgeous color and flavor. "Lovelock," the red summercrisp we've had the past few weeks, is a new lettuce for us this year that has a great flavor and has held up really well in the heat. We just harvested the very first "Sarah's Choice" cantaloupe, which had a better flavor than any melon we've grown so far. (That was an early one, but we should have melons for CSA within three weeks.)

Do you have a favorite vegetable variety? What is it? Why?

Although it's looking to be mighty hot this week, we're glad for the sun and heat and lack of rain. It'll give us a chance to catch up on weeding, which had been a real challenge in the wet weather. Fewer weeds and more sunshine should give the plants a big boost this week, and the dry weather will hopefully push back against some disease and pest problems that crop up when it's moist for too long.

One potential issue we're keeping an eye on is a disease called late blight. You might remember it from 2009, when it wiped out tomatoes and potatoes across most of New England. Late blight can't overwinter here, but the spores get blown up on storms from the south, where it is present year-round. Usually it doesn't get here until late summer (thus the name), but it has been confirmed already in Massachusets and New York. Under organic management, there aren't a whole lot of options beyond pruning tomatoes well to encourage air flow and hoping for a good stretch of dry weather to slow down or stop the spread of the disease. Conventional growers can use several powerful anti-fungal sprays, but the only one available to organic farmers is copper, and it only really works if you use it before there are any symptoms. So we're pruning, and hoping, and keeping a close eye on the maps.

With luck, we'll have tomatoes for CSA pretty soon, and for a while!

We were glad to get a bit of sun and warmth over the weekend, but the combination of hot and humid with torrential downpour has had us playing a tedious game of tag with the greenhouse, which has sides that roll up to let heat out. We don't want the tomatoes to get wet, so when it rains we run over to close the sides and doors. (Tag!) But we don't want it to be too hot or humid in there, because that can stress the plants and cause disease. So when the sun comes out, we run over and open it all up. (Tag!) I think we must've done that a dozen times yesterday as storms swept through.

The strange weather has also made it hard to judge when crops will be coming ready - two weeks ago we had several little zucchinis, which generally indicates lots of imminent giant zucchinis, but they've mostly just stayed little. However, the peas are still cranking out peas, and everything is coming along, if slowly. We continue to be grateful for our good, sandy soil - we spent years looking for a farm and "not clay soil" was one of our major criteria. This season is making us glad that we held out for this great piece of land. Even still, some big downpours have caused washouts in a few places in the field, and one spot that's usually a bit wet now has a little running stream. Jeremy took the tractor through with the plow attached and dug a ditch to give the water somewhere to go; hopefully that'll help it drain out of the rest of the field. We know farms that have really flooded in the rain, so despite the frustration, we're glad to just be suffering from slow growth, muddy boots, and big weeds.

Greens are good, peas are pleasant, but POTATOES are the spring treat we get most excited about here at Gildrien Farm. Friends and loyal customers will have heard this before, but new potatoes - those first, teeny early ones with tender skin glowing bright as  - are a revelation every year.

Most people expect that a fresh, local tomato grown in good soil and picked at the peak of ripeness will be better than fed on chemical fertilizer and picked green so that it could withstand a 3,000 mile trip. Well, it is just as true that a little baby potato unearthed just days before from its home in healthy soil will taste better - so much better, and so different - than a giant Russet that's been bred for size, sprayed with nearly 40 pesticides, and then treated to prevent sprouting during its year in storage. Even a local, organic potato that you might still have in your root cellar from last fall will pale in comparison. Even the local, organic potatoes harvested fresh in the fall for winter storage are not nearly as good. These new spring potatoes are a delight, and we hope you like them as much as we do.