Those of you who are not out of town this week will be getting a CSA box that has been carefully crafted for the Independence Day holiday on Friday.

It’s a bit puzzling how produce items including watermelon, sweet corn, and tomatoes became key components of the July 4th holiday. There are only a few places in the U.S. where you would have been able to grow those items and harvest them by early July. Luckily for us, and for you, our farm in Winters is one of them.

Farmers in Winters have known for well over 100 years that there is something about this area that allows summer fruit and vegetables to grow and ripen more quickly than most other areas nearby. Historically, this was the first area to ship apricots and peaches to San Francisco. And they did go via ship (or boat), after travelling by train 40 miles from here to the Sacramento River Delta where they were loaded onto waiting vessels.

Despite this natural advantage, it can still be challenging for us to hit the July 4th deadline. Sweet Corn in particular is a very punctual crop. Depending on the variety, it matures in 70-80 days, and needs to be picked within a day or two and then sold within 3 days. Corn is grown from seeds and requires the ground to be fairly dry in order to plant, so just one ill-timed rainstorm in April can knock us out of the running. There have been years when we’ve had Corn the week prior to the holiday and the week after, but not the week of. And cold weather in April can slow down the growth, adding a week or ten days to the maturity time.

Unlike with corn, we grow watermelons from transplants, giving us more ability to work around the weather when planting. The plants themselves don’t seem to mind cool weather or rain when they are young, but once they start to flower, it’s important to have good weather so the bees will pollinate them — not too hot or too cold.

As far as ripening is concerned, until last year we had always believed “the hotter, the better”. But it turns out that the plants go into survival mode once it gets too hot, using the carbohydrates from photosynthesis to grow more foliage in an effort to keep themselves cool. During the heatwaves in 2024 and 2023, the watermelons stopped ripening completely for several weeks. That has not been a problem this year, and we started harvesting right on time this week.

4th of July tomatoes are basically a given for our CSA boxes, as we’ve never reached this date without the crop ripening. That said, it’s nice to have our first big “flush” of specialty and heirloom varieties to send you this week. Those varieties tend to ripen several weeks to a month later than standard tomatoes, and are particularly sensitive to cold or very hot weather that affects their pollination. This year, we’ve got a bumper crop that started ripening last week and should continue well into July.

There are some other fun items in your boxes this week but we’re really proud of the Star-Spangled Trilogy of Corn, Watermelons and Tomatoes and we hope you enjoy them for your holiday celebrations.

Thanks,

Pablito