Gettin' 'em in!

This is my first week as a summer apprentice, and boy, has it been a whirlwind!  We are racing to get as many of our summer crops in as possible, especially since today it's supposed to rain and be cooler.We started off on Tuesday by planting a row of peppers and eggplants, and on Wednesday we also planted  radishes in between the eggplants in the other row.  We're hoping that the radishes will attract the flea beetles more than the eggplants do, so the radishes act as a sort of sacrifice to help our eggplants.  This strategy worked pretty well last year, so we figured we'd try it again.  For the eggplants in our other row, we're not going to plant any radishes around them so we can compare.  As always, we love to experiment in our garden! Moving on to Thursday, we planted basil in between our tomatoes- thank you to a couple of Morven Summer Institute students for helping us!  In the evening, we planted rows of summer squash and zucchini.  I remember planting zucchini last year too, except it was much hotter on that morning.  Yesterday was so pleasant and calm when Michelle and I were planting.  It felt so good to be in the garden with dirty hands!  Then, today we planted more radishes in our radish/turnip row and planted some bush beans as well.  Wow, it's just been a planting-filled week!This morning was also busy because we harvested a bunch of vegetables to deliver to the Boar's Head.  We got to use our fancy new scale too to weigh everything!  We picked almost eight pounds of lettuce and over two pounds of kale and swiss chard each.  We were definitely on rapid-fire harvest mode.In other news, I started advertising for our first CSA session which starts on June 14th.  It's $50 per share and lasts for one month, with one pick-up day per week.  I'm so excited to start on year two of our CSA!  Please contact me (Rowan at ris3xq@virginia.edu) if you're interested to buying a share!One more thing!  I checked on all of the beehives this week, and they are doing well.  I'm worried about one colony, but I'm going to let them do their thing adn wait and see how they're doing.  I have started a Bee Blog too so please check it out if you'd like to read more!