I always find this month an interesting time in the garden! Many of the summer veggies have peaked but are still huge and productive. The tomatoes, for instance, are still big and beautiful, and thankfully still ripening. The kale is so huge it stops people in their tracks. The Swiss chard, peppers and eggplants continue to look good. Meanwhile, it is time to pull out those that have finished and make way to replant for even more good eating down the way.
Today I spent a couple of hours out in the garden. It was time to harvest the pumpkins and pull out the declining vines. Same for the cucumbers that have climbed to the top of our six-foot hand-made trellis. (Amazingly, there were about 6 pounds of cucumbers hidden in there!) And by the end of the season like this, there are dead and fallen leaves littering the garden, which are becoming slimy and diseased. A good strategy for a healthy garden is to tidy up – slugs love this kind of plant material, so let’s not make it too easy for them.
It was also time to give another pruning to the tomato vines – as I’ve said before, it is important to cut out extra foliage to let in light and air. I also cut out new blooming shoots that had sprouted since I last thinned. All of this will promote ripening – a good thing!
Once the bed was tidied up and I could ascertain how much available space there was for planting, then the fun began! I planted a traypack of Olympia spinach, which did so awesomely in the garden last fall. I also planted a traypack of red Pac Choi, which hopefully will be as prolific as the green variety we put in last fall. And lastly, I put in a traypack of cauliflower. I hope I don’t regret that, because cauliflower takes a bit of room. But since we’ve not had that in the garden yet, I thought we should show you what it does. So check it out the next time you are here.
With all these tasty new things in the garden, I scattered a bit of Sluggo around, just to distract the slugs. As you know, Sluggo is safe for birds and animals, but does the trick for our nemesis the slug. I highly recommend taking preventive measures! And using Sluggo this time of year will kill off the adults before they have a chance to lay eggs over the winter, thereby reducing your slug population next year – a very good thing.
So I hope you too can find a bit of time this week to do some garden clean up and maybe plant a few new things too. Remember the strategy of succession plantings – when something comes out, plant something new! We have a good assortment of veggie starts here now, as well as garlic and onion sets. Now is a great time to get all those going.



Are you all sick of hearing about tomatoes yet? This’ll be quick – folks always want to know what the favorites were at our annual tomato festival, so here they are, listed in descending order of votes. Sungold and Cherokee Purple were by far the crowd favorites, and tomatoes I would personally recommend you try growing at home. Sungold is a prolific cherry, with a sweet and fruity flavor. Cherokee Purple is a large heirloom with a rich tomato flavor and a deep red-purple color with green shoulders. Both are great additions to the summer garden.
Aren’t we having some great tomato-ripening weather?! I’m hopeful we can get them all ripe before winter arrives – the race is on. And just a reminder: if your tomatoes look as thick with foliage as this one pictured, you really need to grab your clippers and start trimming away some of those leaves – you should be able to see some daylight through the plant. The tomato plant doesn’t need all these leaves now, and you really need to expose the green tomatoes to light and air. Trust me; it seems like a totally brutal thing to do, to cut off so much of the foliage, but you will be rewarded if you do!









Now that we’ve got our tomatoes in the ground and summer is nearly upon us, we should give some attention to HOW we are growing these little beauties. The right cultural practices will insure the best possible harvest. None of this is hard, but attention to a few details can make all the difference.





WOW. I’ve never seen such a huge increase in inventory in such a short period of time. We have easily over 100 varieties of tomatoes in stock today – who knows how long they will last, but shipments will continue to come in for several weeks. Quantities are not high for some varieties – we only have one flat of some types - so come on out and shop while the selection is best. We have some very unusual varieties that I don’t believe we’ve ever carried here before, and some of them sound worth trying. Here’s a small sampling of those that caught my eye: