Today, June 21st is the official first day of summer and many folks feel like if they have not started their garden yet, it is too late. But don’t worry you are not too late to start your garden or continue planting out your space. We provide seedlings for sale through Labor Day because there is always some crop that is appropriate for you to plant to get a bountiful harvest.
Our online shop is still full of a wide range of seedlings including many vegetables, herbs, and flowers. New this week is pumpkins! Pumpkins need about 100 days to grow and reach maturity. So if you transplant pumpkin seedlings this week you will be harvesting pretty pumpkins by the first week in October. The varieties we offer make for great decorations but they are also delicious and are perfect for pies or curries.
Another crop that takes 100 days is sweet potatoes. We offer sweet potato slips by the bunch but you must order them through our online shop as we don’t bring them to market unless they have been ordered. Sweet potato greens are a favorite snack for deer. So to prevent deer from eating all our plants in the field we place metal hoops over top of our sweet potato beds and then cover them with bird netting. This simple technique allows our sweet potatoes to grow big and lush.
Fresh beans are a staple on many summer menus and to make sure you have a steady supply of beans you need to plant them multiple times throughout the growing season as one planting won’t make it until the end of the summer. We have bunches of different bean seedlings including bush, pole, and edamame. This week all bean seedlings are on sale at just $2 for each pot. Each pot contains multiple plants but you don’t need to separate them as they happily grow in clumps, so you can just plant the entire fiber pot right in the ground.
We love growing interesting and delicious bean varieties. One of our favorites that we grow every year is Dragon Langerie. This bush bean variety is a show stopper. It has compact stocky bushes that bear abundant purple-violet flowers followed by flat 6″ creamy yellow pods mottled with purple tiger stripes. The beans are crisp, stringless and amazingly juicy when eaten fresh.
Thanks to everyone that gave our garlic scape pesto a try. We received many rave reviews and we are so glad everyone enjoyed it. Garlic scape season is very short and we wanted to indulge in all things garlic scapes as much as we could. Our garlic scape season is coming to a close so we will all have to wait until next year to enjoy the garlic scape pesto once again.
Speaking of seasonal eating we have been getting many questions about when we will be offering our tomatillo salsa again. Our delicious tomatillo salsa aka salsa verde is made with our farm grown tomatillos, so we must wait until we are having bountiful harvests to whip up a batch. Our tomatillo plants are currently covered in flowers with many paper husks developing. We are hoping that the first harvest will occur in early July. So we guesstimate that we will have enough tomatillos to make salsa by the end of July but the exact date all depends on the weather. In the meantime you will just have to dip your chips in our guacamole, pico de gallo, or ceviche.