A visit with Farmer Roger

As we move into summer, I’m finding more and more blossoms in my quest to photograph the blossoms of each of our crops at the farm. In this seventh set, the flowers are all yellow.

Tomatillo blossom

Tomatillo flowers are showier than those of their cousins, the tomatoes. The fruits are covered with a papery husk, and are usually harvested slightly immature. Most commonly used as the basis of salsa verde, tomatillos can also enjoyably be grilled, roasted, sauted, and stewed. 

Cucumber Blossom

Cucumbers have a small yellow flower. Cucumbers are part of the cucurbit family (Wonder where the name comes from?) along with squash, pumpkins, gourds, melons, and watermelons. You can see the similarity between the cucumber blossom and the zucchini blossom, also shown in this entry. We grow several dramatically different cucumbers that I’m sure I’ll write about when the time comes.

Vitamin Green blossom

New to our farm this year, we planted Vitamin Green at the suggestion of Claire Thomas of The Root Connection Farm. It is an excellent green, and was very popular while we had it. Like most greens, Vitamin Green is harvested before the plant sets flower. This year the sudden switch from cool and damp to hot and dry pushed these plants into flowering before we could complete the harvest. This bolting to flower is an undesirable trait in a crop of greens. Much effort is put into breeding resistance to bolting.

The flowers are characteristic of the brassicas, which includes a quite large list of crops; broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, turnips, kohlrabi, kale, collards, mustard, and gai lon, as well as a number of Asian greens less well known to most of us here.

Zucchini Blossom

This is a flower of the Romanesco zucchini, an heirloom variety that we find far superior in flavor and texture to modern types of zucchini. We grow four varieties of summer squash. I will let this photo represent all the summer squash in the blossom photo series. We just started havesting summer squash last Thursday. As long as we keep on picking squash, we should have summer squash until the weather turns cold nest fall.

I expect the potatoes will start blooming before long. Look for potato blossom and sunflower photos soon. I have a sage flower photo, but I need to go back and try again with the tiny thyme blossoms.