How does your garden grow?  I have been enjoying my morning strolls around the garden, eating a couple of strawberries for breakfast and checking out the progress.  We don't have any large tomatoes yet--they're still green, but snacking on cherry tomatoes is a daily occurrence now.  This is the time of year that I envy those in Penn Valley, or other sunnier locations, who are already feasting on tomatoes.  There's nothing quite like consuming the produce of your own garden.

	And so it begins: cherry tomatoes!

Have you made it to the Grass Valley Thursday Night Market, or the Nevada City Summer Nights?  Our region is known for these events in the summer, and the corresponding Cornish Christmas and Victorian Christmas in the winter.  All four feature street closures with craft and food vendors, and music and other entertainment.  The Thursday Night Market also has a certified farmers market.

This week we have a Peruvian coffee for you.  Last week we talked about the geography and geology that you can learn while studying coffee, and this one is probably better known than the Indonesian islands.  If you're not familiar with Peru, it's located in the northwest of South America, and the Andes mountains run through it.  It is bordered by Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, and the Pacific Ocean.

Knowing that arabica coffee loves high elevation volcanic soil, you can imagine that specialty coffee grows well in Peru.  This is a strictly hard bean (SHB), which is sometimes also designated SHG, or strictly high grown.  In this post from 2013, we discussed how these terms "indicate that the coffee is grown at a high altitude, which leads to lower production and a denser bean: the quality and taste tend to be higher in the cup."

This Vida Alta Peru (which translates to "high life") is roasted light.  The taste in the cup is sweet and milk chocolate-y: it would be a delicious way to start your day.  You can try a cup on us with the code tomatoes soon this week.  In other news, Carolines Coffee is living a double life as a Pokémon gym--and we have fun watching all the Pokémon GO players here and around town.  Best of luck to all of you.  Have a great weekend, and drink good coffee.  Cheers!