this was 8 days ago:


here they are today:


there's a total of 6 black krims ripening right now, not counting this one which i harvested and ate today:


it split along the bottom; i think because it was resting on one of the bars of the cage. but it was still very tasty.

this is one of the yellow pear plants from 9 days ago:


it's now laden with ripe and ripening fruit, and this was my haul today from this plant and the cherry roma:


the other yellow pear and the black cherry are taking longer.

and here's my perfectly weeded and tended tomato patch. cry your heart out, mora.

fucking hell. and to think i was proud of my measly tomato crop. what variety is that?

My most stubborn (and anticipated!) plant finally gives me some beans!
These are small red limas from Chiapas.

Plain old Early Girls (with a couple of smaller Sweet 100s thrown in). We've tried lots of varieties over the years but keep coming back to these. Although not particularly early this year, they are good for our shorter season.

today's black krim haul:



are early girls good pasta sauce tomatoes?

Pretty good fresh eaters and for relish, all-around but we don't tend to make sauce with them.

Nice krims!

They'd be wasted on sauce. They're really good as slicing and eating tomatoes.
You'd waste the fresh flavor and they'd be too watery.
Same with your fancy black russians, too!
Although there is nothing better than cubing one of these and cubing some fresh mozzerella and tossing with hot pasta and olive oil. Sort of an instant sauce.
You need to grow a plum tomato next year. And then we can look forward to your posts in the canning and preserving thread. Joy unleashed is what I'd caLL that.

yes, the black krims are eaten raw. i would like to grow a tomato for saucing purposes. maybe i'll see if the herb man has san marzanos next year.

and now, i'm off to the state fair.

Jesus Christ, he's gone native.

Why oh why couldn't I of had as many fresh new tomatoes happening at the start of the tomato season? I was looking at the tomato house, (ask Jaymes, she has seen it) and there are lots and lots of new tomatoes starting to happen. I am going to be overloaded with green tomatoes when time comes to cut the bushes down. I know I will be making some green tomato relish and maybe pickle some of the smaller ones. Should this be in the complaining thread or the canning thread? Until then it is lots of fried green tomatoes.

My very first ever post on MF might help...

i want to try to grow globe artichokes in the garden next year is that just a crazy dream in new york?

Joiei, this happens to me way too often & there are a couple of things you could try. At first frost I cover the plants with something protective and removable, as we often get a couple weeks of decent weather between our early frosts. You can also pick the largest greens, put them on a dark shelf covered with sheets of newspaper, and many will ripen due partly to the ethylene gas they give off. Also, it does work, some, to pull up the whole plant and hang it upside down in a dark room, like a basement. Obviously all of this works best on the largest (3/4 of full size) green tomatoes as they will ripen, kept warm and out of the sun, more than they will grow.

Our tomato plants are over 12 feet tall so hanging in the basement would not work really. I think the relish and the pickled are the way for me to go this year. And we do pull at first frost and that is a bit away. Usually early November.

I may have done a bad thing. Need friendly advice. I just spent hundreds of dollars having my gardner prune back all the neighbor's growth to behind my property line. Then the neighbor cats found some exposed dirt. I bought a bale of bark to discourage them. Didn't help. So last night I just lost my temper and spread two whole bags of cayenne pepper all over the spot. Am I going to hell for being mean to cats? I tried to Google riddance ideas.
We have coyotes around so sprinkling coyote urine may not be advisable. Anyone try that scarecrow motion sensing sprinkler thing? The cayenne pepper might not be good for birds, either. They say to put rocks or prickly pine cones on the spot. I'm a little tired already of the dry creekbed look and am a little short on ponderosa pinecones (the kind they suggested) though I know there's a mountain about two hours away with a handful of native ponderosas along the road.

When I've wanted to supplement my spreading of 40,000 btu cayenne pepper [which I'm not convinced has ever worked in my gardens], I've laid down chicken wire and covered it with a light dusting of compost for aesthetic purposes [who wants to look at chicken wire?]. The cats can't scratch before and after their duties and go elsewhere.

The coyotes should eliminate the cat problem pretty quickly. They'll also resolve any mice, other vermin, squirrel, chipmunk, etc difficulties you may have.

Hadn't thought of that. Excellent. Haven't heard them lately but they used to make quite a racket every night. Wonder if it's seasonal. Need to do a little research.

Boy, would Joe Schirmer (Dirty Girl Farm/Produce) and his mother, Robin Somers, disagree. So do I!

If you mean dry-farmed Early Girls, they're fantastic for sauces.

And even if not, my best sauces involve blanching every single tomato, fat/thin, red/black/yellow/green/orange, small or big: and every Early Girl is part of the pot.

I blanche and skin them, and ignore advice to squeeze out the pith and seeds. Give the blender a quick pulse, and then start cooking them in a big pot with already-sautéed minced onions. Cook them down and add basil and stuff.

You can do anything with tomatoes. I've got about ten pounds of tomatoes so multi-cultural that it looks like a Barack Obama choir. (No white tomatoes, alas. That plant produced nothing. Neither did Northern Lights, or some others. Paul Robeson, on the other hand, well, that kicked them out.)

We had the wilt in our garden. But we had zucchini enough to make fritters until this week, and a lot of other stuff.

Supposed to rain here this week, very much too early. I have the UCSC Farm's Harvest Festival to work on Saturday, and then photograph a wedding. An outdoor wedding.

Mongo: you cannot go wrong using an Early Girl in a sauce. Flavor and juice just means cooking it longer. Add fresh herbs. Salt. Whatevah.

Hope that helps.

Our backyard maples are in full flare.

Your maples are lovely, fly.

We're just getting the first few blushes of reds, yellows and browns in northern NJ. Mostly above 700 to a thousand feet. Should be lovely in a week or so.

I spent some time today drying rosemary, tarragon, lavender, and basil from the garden and jarring them. More basil and some oregano on tap for tomorrow. The Hungarian peppers and jalapenos are so small, it's hardly worth drying them, but first frost will probably come next week to ten days.

Wow. I spent part of my childhood in northern Michigan (not the UP, but as close as you can get), and this is what I miss from there.

We've had frost - disadvantage of being in the Great White North.

We've dried some sage but don't bother with the tarragon. The rosemary lives inside for the winter. We have a rather large pot of rosemary. Okay, an eighth of the livingroom pot of rosemary, not so much a pot as a very large planter. On wheels.

We brought in some basil too and hope to make pistou.

Is anyone thinking of next year's garden yet?

Very much so! I have a bunch of gardening books out from the library & have been looking at the sale items at Edible Landscaping.: Another japanese wineberry or two are definitely in my future

A friend has promised me some asparagus in the spring if I can find a sunny enough spot for them. I may have to take over more of the parking strip

Am leaning towards a dwarf Magellan barberry, as I'm told they have better flavor than the Darwin???

I'm trying to balance my desire for edible plants with the desire for low maintenance evergreen plantings I can mostly ignore, so I'm going to put in a bunch more lingonberies & various types of strawberries. Any suggestions of other shade tolerant evergreen edibles gratefully accepted. (zone 7b)

not edible, but I've fallen in love with the idea of giant Himalayan Lillies: 12-15 foot tall shade loving flowers, who could ask for more? Now I just have to find them locally (tons of UK sites carry them, not so much on the US sites...)

I really liked this mesclun mix we tried this past year:

http://www.veseys.com/us/en/store/vegetabl...zestymesclunmix

Also we grew Little Gems and they were great:

http://www.veseys.com/us/en/store/vegetabl.../littlegempearl

We also grew yellow filet beans this year and didn't eat nearly enough of them:

http://www.veseys.com/us/en/store/vegetabl...chfilet1/soleil

I suppose it's too early to put in new raspberry bushes. I love the idea of edible landscaping, or at least with the idea of planting stuff to eat. Landscaping connotes making things look pretty, which I have never been good at.

Do you like Vesey's? I've never used them.

I have only ordered from them once, last year, but was quite pleased with their promptness, and I enjoy their catalogues. They can be a bit persistent with marketing of Mantis tillers, as they are one of Canada's prime distributors of same (in outrageous French accent: "I told them we already got one!") but other than that they are very pleasant. They frequently have free shipping specials.

I beleive you can plant Raspberries year round. Anyone have opinions on the most flavorful raspberries? the best I've ever tasted are from a bush that was already there when a friend bought her house, so we have no idea of the variety

I just planted some early tomatoes. Siletz, Rostova. Then I couldn't stop myself and planted all the others. All in all about 15 varieties. Still wondering if I should break out my Chinese tomato seeds.

The oh so tempting Territorial Seed catalog came this week so I'm "window shopping" for next spring's garden

There WILL be asparagus, for the rest I'm still riffling pages & musing. The snow is almost completely gone from the yard now so I can stare at the various beds & think about what might work where. We have very limited full sun space so that is defacto saved for the tomatos & zukes (and now spargies) everything else is a game of trial & error & negotiation...

ETA how are chinese tomatoes different?

I plan on doing a little guerrilla gardening this coming year, something my HOA frowns upon. I've only tried limited container gardening in the past so this will be something of an experiment. Do y'all have favorite seed companies or catalogs? There are a lot of them out there and I'd like to find a reliable supplier with a well stocked, informative catalog. Any help would be appreciated.

Chad

The ones I rely on are John Scheepers, Johnny's Selected Seeds, and The Cook's Garden. All have very good websites.

The snow has melted in Seattle. I am afraid we may have lost the creeping rosemary in front, but have plenty more on the side yard - and maybe the back (haven't checked.) The favas planted as an overwintering crop look black - too much for them this year. Maybe even for the mustard cress. How come the weeds don't die too? Especially those cress like ones with the scattering seeds...The pampas grasses and ferns need a good pruning. Not sure if the Japanese maple will survive - it was already distressed. The trunk is striated with black...Parsley in the herb pot looks healthy, oregano too.

Oh I know, I'm gazing upon the lurid riches of the Tomato Growers Supply Co. catalog as I type this. Oh God, I love this catalog. I like the new formatting this year. New Big Dwarf, now that is a tomato with a sexy name. Big, tasty tomatoes on a compact plant...I might actually order some of that.

I really need to restrain myself though because I'm still working through the varieties I already have and I don't have enough gardener friends to palm stuff onto. I don't want to give them to just anybody because I intend on browbeating the recipients into saving some seed for me. *sigh* what's a girl to do.

Actually, I dunno how Chinese tomatoes are different. I got them from a seed exchange group I'm in. The varieties I have so far are called Hezou and Zhefen and I think both are relatively small-fruited red varieties. I'll probably plant them in 2010 as I have a really small garden. I'm already at max capacity with 15 varieties...oh who am I kidding. I'll find a way to squeeze them in somehow! Hahah!

Right now, the snow peas are growing, the peppers are holding on (made some decent kimchi with some of the last of the hot peppers), the kale is growing slowly but surely. The first crop of beets are almost ready for harvest.

My mini tangerine tree has little tangerines that are coloring up nicely. However, it's the first year and tangerines need to really root into the ground and settle in before the fruit get any kind of richness at all, according to the books. We'll see.

Renee's Garden has excellent seeds, and supplies lots of them to the UCSC Farm & Garden program.

I am looking forward to taking a class or two up at Love Apple Farm. Her "Grow Better Veggies" blog is definitely worth reading.

Cynthia's about to put twenty hours into an online project, sourcing the varieties of tomatoes she'll grow this year. I can't wait to see the results of that...

Our tomatoes didn't do that well this summer—they got the wilt or something, and we've got to swap out some beds for other things, like broccoli or cauliflower. (Lucky me, we get all our seedings for free. It's fun having a farmer for a BFF.)

I've had good luck with Johnny's seeds as well. Also with Ed Hume's seeds but those I can just pick up at the store. Being in the PacNW, where tomatoes are dicey anyway, I wait & buy tomato starts in late spring rather than try to grow my own from seeds. Ditto zucchini & cukes.

We have limited tree space in our yard so I think Grafting is my best bet for increasing our variety of fruits. Any favorite sources for scions out there?

Tom Spicer is prepping his garden in Dallas.

Somehow I scheduled a gardening day for today when the high in Seattle will be 40F - brr! but things are looking really sad ofter the snow, so it's in desperate need of some tidying... I think I'll go grab a couple of glacier pansies to tuck in for a little pick-me-up becuase it's looking pretty dreary right now.

The good news is that I can see the tips of a lot of bulbs starting to push up, so I imagive we'll have crocus-o-rama in another few weeks (IF the cutworms don't re-emerge & destroy them!)

My tomato seedlings are starting their third set of leaves. I can't wait to put them in the ground. I think I might get cocky an start squash soon as well. Probably some lettuces and spinach too.

So pretty!

I love the rainbow carrots. I grow them in pots... no bending!

We went out and picked all the ripe tomatoes today, as there is a risk of frost tonight. But we expect things will be okay as we are not terribly low-lying. The cucumbers are shot, but we have swiss chard and hot peppers left. And herbs and my last planting of baby pak choy and some carrots, the latter two in pots and moved to high ground. Those carrots sure are tasty.

Upwards of ten pounds of tomatoes from our garden today, with two pints or so of padróns. Naturally, a four-variety caprese.



And this pan of tomatoes, roasting for sauce tomorrow.



I cooked the padróns for someone who's never had them, and he loved the "dark green" taste.

With four days of scorching Indian summer weather coming up, I imagine our tomato and pepper output will be on steroids this week. The more, the merrier.

I wish I could make incense from the aromas in my kitchen. It's like the Catholic Church of Heirlooms.

Sad day in the garden on Sunday. Frost is likely tonight in the hills of northwestern NJ.

Covered the remaining basil and rosemary. The last pepper plant (hot chocolate tear gas variety) is also covered with a garbage can. The last few tomatoes have been picked.

Scorecard:

Box car Willie tomatoes - good production, harvested some, but they went fast into the blight

Red Pear tomatoes - excellent production, got most of the crop before the blight

Cherry tomatoes - great production, but the drought followed by too much rain caused many to split

Trupti chile - good production, but the deer cleaned me out

Haitian purple chile - ditto

Genovese basil - prolific production, still in heavy bloom

Taurus pepper - OK, but the deer liked them

Extensive sage, parsley, cilantro, and lettuce growth in containers on the deck where the deer can't get to them