Midsummer is the hardest but best time for us to look around and start making plans and changes for next year. All we need to do is stroll through the vegetable beds with pen and paper and take notes of what's working and what's not, which varities are winners and which are lacking. But alas we don't usually make the time. And then by winter when we are planning and buying seeds the memories of all our brilliant ideas and the poor performing varieties from the summer are hazy or completely forgotten.
So I got inspired this past week during my weekly to-do list tour around the farm to also take notes for next year. I thought I would share a few of them here.

• All tomatoes grown indoors. This year we put most of our tomatoes in our hoophouses and they are great. We love them - they take more work pruning and trellising to keep them under control, but they have NO DISEASE. This compares to our field tomatoes which are always tortured by septoria and early blight and we often hardly get any crop out of them. And there's not really any organic treatment for these diseases. This is definitely a waste of valuable bedspace.
• Speaking of wasting valuable bedspace - we are pretty sure we are going to stop trying to grow peas and melons. Now you might think to yourself "I didn't know they grew either of those crops?" Exactly! We have put up a valiant effort trying to get these crops to grow and produce a decent yield for us over the years. While some crops might have a poor yield in a particular year, these two are perennial poor performers for us. Peas seem like we grow them just so they can die on us. And melons just do not make any kind of economic sense to grow. We continued growing them the the last few years because we felt they were a treat for the CSA members. But with such low yields we can't keep doing it.
• We tried this year putting insect netting on the new hoophouse to keep out the cucmber beetles (which along with flea beetles are our most challenging pests). But they were already in the soil so they still ended up decimating our precious cucmbers inside. So I think we'll not have cucmbers in the hoophouse next year and instead have one more indoor bed for the aforementioned tomatoes.
• Putting tomato cages around the tomatillos worked great! And because we can now walk down the row harvesting them we spend a little less time on our hands and knees which is basically our never-ending quest.

Well I've got lots more nuggets but thats probably enough detailed farm-geek information for you to take in in one shot.

lettuce mix

pea shoots
sunflower shoots
squash and zucchini
parsley
potatoes
Swiss chard
kale
leeks
eggplant
tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
green beans
dragon tongue beans
tomatillos
peppers
garlic
carrots
beets
cabbage
sweet onions
shallots
a few melons

next week - probably the same