Here it is almost the end of July.

Mike Birch

Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 8:00 AM

Summer has arrived. The tomatoes look like they will be going strong in the next couple of weeks. I look forward to the tomatoes. I plan on eating a tomato sandwich most every day while they last.

The summer squash plants look very big and healthy. They should be good producers for us this year.

One of the eggplants has a tiny fruit starting on it and the Jimmy Nardello's Sweet Italian Frying peppers are coming along. The hot weather over the next week should help everything get big and ripe.

In August we start one more big planting push for the fall vegetables. Last year it seemed like it rained all August and I wasn't able to plant until September, which was much too late. I didn't have a good harvest until the last week of the market. I do remember saying to myself, "I should plant this week" and myself reply back, "Wait until next week." I hope I learned that lesson.

Other than that it has been a very interesting year. We've watched things work and we've seen things fail. This year we are doing some different vegetables than I did last year. New for this year was sweet corn, beans, winter squash and fennel. We planted the sweet corn too early and nothing ever became of it. The beans and fennel worked great, and we'll have to see how the winter squash does. I have high hopes for the Delicata squash.

Clare says now is the time to evaluate what went wrong and try to fix it for the second half. I couldn't agree more.