The other night I left our little guy loading the market trucks with his dad and our crew and headed to our northernmost field with a spring in my step. It was time for dinner, and what’s more, it was time for TOMATOES.

I’m sorry to taunt y’all like this. For lots of folks, tomatoes are IT – the thing you wait for through three agonizing seasons, the reason you joined a CSA, the summertime siren song that wakes you from your sweet Saturday morning slumber and gets you out the door and to market. Local tomatoes really are that good … but you can’t have any, not just yet.

But soon! We decided to gamble this spring by planting a small early generation of tomatoes and covering the young seedlings with floating row cover. This row cover can protect the plants from light frosts but certainly not a hard freeze. And hard freezes are not uncommon, even in late spring. But you probably recall that spring 2012 was unusually warm. Our plants survived! And now the rows are filled with hard green fruits — so much promise! And the mighty little cherry tomatoes are just beginning to ripen.

What you see above are Sunsugars. They’re incredible. They are also very, very vigorous and prolific. We were pretty set in our “No way are we growing and picking cherry tomatoes! We’ll be picking them until the middle of the night! We won’t have time to irrigate, or to pick squash, or to squoosh potato beetles, or to plant the rest of the tomatoes, or to deliver the CSA shares, or…” ways – until we tasted these. And then it just didn’t seem right not to share them.

Since they’ve just started producing, there aren’t enough for the CSA or market quite yet. But it won’t be long now.

What about you? What vegetable or season in the farm year do you most look forward to?