6/29

Last night was the first zucchini bread baking night of the summer.  And you know what that means – my garden is overflowing with zucchinis.  There are so many that I struggle to harvest them all before they reach gargantuan sizes.  Last night’s bounty – two loaves and 18 muffins – came from a single oversized ‘Portofino’ zuke.

It is full blown summer here in Southern California.  The tomatoes are covered in bright yellow flowers, the eggplant in purple flowers, and the peppers in white.  Cukes are ready and the basil is coming along nicely.

Across the country, my fellow test gardeners are also hard at work.
Don Boekelheide who gardens both at home and in a community garden in Charlotte, North Carolina, is rejoicing at the recent arrival of rain.  Nature’s irrigation no doubt helped his ‘Apricot Blush’ zinnias, which he says were the first summer blooms in his front garden.   

Don is a man who enjoys his beans.  He likes ‘Garrafal Oro,’ a “mangetout” type bean (meaning that the entire bean is edible), but broader, and with what Don describes as more tender, better tasting beans. This pole bean recently outgrew its six-foot tall trellis, leaving Don to figure out how to attach yet another trellis on top.

Bush beans, on the other hand, stay compact, and Don’s ‘Magirus’ is producing so well that one night a few weeks ago, he harvested a bucketful from a 12’ long row.  They were great eaten fresh off the vine, a bit hairy cooked. 

Having survived attacks by Mexican bean beetles and Colorado potato beetles, both types of beans are now dealing with Japanese beetles (how do those tiny beetles travel those long distances to North Carolina?).  Don picks off adults and eggs off by hand.  Despite holey leaves, the beans continue to produce prolifically.

Ann Caffey in Walsenberg, Colorado reports that unseasonably cool weather seems to have slowed the development of her summer crops.  Tomato plants are still less than a foot tall, while eggplants and pepper plants, cukes and zukes have grown only about six inches. 

Ann’s cosmos have, in her words, “just fizzled out,” while Calendula ‘Solar Flashback Mix’ are going strong and “absolutely beautiful.”  The half dollar sized flowers bloom in shades of cream and burgundy to yellow and red.  They are prolific and long-lasting. That comes as no surprise to us “seasoned” testers.  We found other ‘Flashbacks’ to do extremely well in our 2004 tests.  Mine have reseeded every year since.

With summer crops still to come, Ann is knee deep (so to speak) in greens, especially ‘Monnopa’ and ‘Renegade’ spinach.  “Both have done very well,” she writes, “though I do prefer the ‘Monnopa.’  It has been more prolific, darker in color and the older leaves are more crinkly, which I like.  Both germinated quickly and I had no bugs or dampening off.  Also, both recovered quickly from drought stress.”

Speaking of greens, Debbie Leung who tests seeds in Olympia Washington recently shared her perspective on Asian greens:

"My theory is that the great diversity of mustards has lead to many varieties used by various Asian cultures. There are the very dark green cupped leaves of tatsoi that grow flat on the ground in cool weather, to the tall upright bok choys with the fat juicy white stems and every variation in between.
Then, there are what I call the hot mustards with very spicy flavors that are usually cooked. Take a look at a catalog specializing in Asian vegetables like Evergreen Y.H. Enterprises and you’ll see what I mean. The West has been opening up to these varieties but doesn’t really know how to deal with the huge variation, so they get called mustard or various renditions of bok choy (pak choi etc, which in Chinese all mean “white vegetable”). So this thing I’m testing is called tatsoi, but it’s really part of that continuum of bok choys.
I grew up with some of these choys. For the farmers market, I once grew a variant with large tatsoi-like leaves on tall, upright skinny stems ...it was unfamiliar to me but customers from a different part of Asia were excited to see something they had grown up with."

Happy Gardening!

Nan Sterman

Comments

[Pedro Angco]

Happy gardenning!!!
Organic Farming!!!!!
Thinking outside the Box......
New Paradigm of organic farming....
Changing the Mind Set.....
Human being is just like a seed...... freedom to grow in an environment of good faith...