Growing heirloom tomatoes part 1 covers heirloom seeds, seeding, planting, and managing to care for many more seedlings than ever imagined. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3! Click through to YouTube for highest resolution. I planted over 200 seeds this year, 150 of them tomato! Nine varieties were from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and the […]
The only advantage of our recent heatwave, it pushes summer veggies into fall. I thought I would return from Tennessee and my garden would be burnt to a crisp in the record heatwave of mid-September. Rather, my summer veggies got a boost from the 90+° heat. After pulling all but one tomato vine, the very prolific red cherry […]
Southern Fried Okra, SoCal Style! I planted okra seed in May, but it got overshadowed by squash leaves, so I bought nursery plants in late June and just yesterday harvested a handful of okra. Growing up in the South, we always had fresh-frozen okra in the freezer from my grandmother’s garden in Alabama. Mother would fry […]
Brown Widows for Breakfast? As I contemplated the hunger pangs in my stomach yearning for a late breakfast, and armed with encouragement from online gardeners +Learn to Grow, +CragfireGardening, +Double Dog Farm +Cheryl Krause and others, and a can of Raid®, I ventured out to face the enemy, a spider. Late yesterday, my new, young garden helper […]
Late Bloomer – Summer Garden Wrap-up covers the resolution of Kaye’s big mildew on cucurbits (squash, pumpkin, melons, cucumber) after a visit to friend Dorothy’s squash patch in the 20 degree hotter San Fernando Valley, plus seeding and planting her third winter garden. When the goldfinches have had their fill of the amaranth, the area of […]
In Late Bloomer – Summer Garden Update – Part 3, Kaye harvests late season tomatoes, okra and zucchini and deals with blight, mildew and aphids on milkweed. She vows to conquer some of these issues in next summer’s garden! Southern Fried Okra recipe below. She’s mystified by the long, scarlet radishes. Get a glimpse of […]
Kaye does it again, crowds everything together! Predictably, in a coastal microclimate like Pacific Palisades has, cucurbits (cucumber, squash, melons) get hit with downy mildew. The good news is Kaye achieves perfect corn pollination, thanks to daily shaking of the tassels. All the corn gets eaten raw in the garden. And there are baskets of […]
Late Bloomer – Summer Garden Update – Part 1 covers what you can grow in 300 square feet in a front yard, in this case, amaranth, corn, cucumbers, zucchini, beans, tomatoes, California native plants and more. The Nanday Conure wild parrot flock return to destroy Kaye’s sunflowers, and amaranth shoots survive transplant. Kaye tries flytraps […]
Late Bloomer Lesson #1 for Garden Issues covers a problem that has arisen in July in the Late Bloomer Garden. If you have downloaded my free ebook, “10 Steps to a Great First Garden,” (sign-up box on right), you will have heard of my LBL’s, or Late Bloomer Lessons. The beautiful, wondrous and sometimes frustrating thing about […]
Late Bloomer – Summer Garden Plantings on Mother’s Day is online! Kaye reviews what’s planted in her front yard organic garden for summer from veggies to perennials, to herbs and berries in pots, all to the original guitar compositions by Jon Pileggi! In addition to all the edibles named in the episode, there is an artichoke, […]
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