It’s been a very busy time of year for us growers, while Mother Nature and weather have been fickle at best so far. Our 2024 growing season really began in October of last year with the planting of hundreds of garlic and red shallot so that they could “over-winter” and be ready for scapes in June, with harvest and curing in July. It’s going to be a banner year for the garlic as some of them are so large that some of the visiting school kids (below), thought they were corn stalks!

We started early this year in mid-February for our seeds to starts process, utilizing dozens of heat-mats for the 1020 trays in the greenhouse for those crops needing a head-start especially our tomatoes, hot peppers, and the cucumber varieties. We’ve already ‘turned over’ (crop rotation) a number of raised beds including lovely lettuce, crunchy carrots and succulent scallions that we sold at the Tumwater, Olympia Markets and South Sound Fresh that are now full up again with the likes of Jalapeno (green & purple), Habanero, and other spiciest of peppers including Carolina Reaper and Ghost Peppers as well as tomato varieties such as Lemon Boy, Sun Gold, Early Girl and Valencia.

One of the key ingredients in green salsa-verde is of course Tomatillos. Requiring open pollination, heat-loving, and need to be grown together, we have two places that the Tomatillos just love, and we already have some golf-ball size fruits. In the outdoor grow-beds, we’re off to a good start with our cucumbers (slicing, pickling and yellow), onions and zucchini (summer and winter squash)