Our guest this week on the Gardenerd Tip of the Week Podcast is Evan Gregoire of Heirloom Seedhouse. His farm is located in the Pacific Northwest, where he supports over 500 different plant varieties each year.
When I ask clients "What type of tomatoes do you want to grow?" the answer I expect to hear is "cherry", "plum", "paste", "slicing" or "beefsteak". Instead, most often the response is, "Oh, I want to grow those heirloom kind." To which I reply, "Which one?" There are more than 400 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. There are cherry, plum, paste, grape, salad-sized, and beefsteak heirloom tomatoes that come in every color of the rainbow. So before we go any further,…
It's harvest time for tomatoes, whether they be determinate or indeterminate. These orbs of delight are the quintessential summer fruit and we're picking them daily. We planted early this year (quite possibly a mistake since we now have blight...but then again, we get blight every year, so I give up). We grew 18 different varieties this year, all heirlooms, all gorgeous. Here's a little tomato parade for 2014: Our first time growing these successfully. Can't wait to make sauce. Jaune…
I had the opportunity to provide a Green Tip for Jeff Davis's Go Green America TV a short while ago, and today it's live. It's part of Jeff's Green Tip Tuesday series, bringing helpful, environmentally-friendly tidbits to viewers every week. The Green Tip answers the question, "Why should I grow heirloom seeds?" Check it out below: For more information on growing heirloom seeds, here are some previous blog posts to help guide you: Seed Libraries: Check it Out! Seed Catalog…
With Monsanto's renegade GMO wheat in the news, the importance of growing and preserving heirloom and open pollinated seed is even more evident. Every year we plant and heirloom we've never grown, and this year it was the Poona Kheera cucumber. The Poona Kheera is an heirloom cucumber from India, where the fruit's heritage finds its origins. It's a light colored cucumber with skin that darkens to resemble a russet potato when ripe. How could any gardenerd resist something that…
Chalk it up to climate change, or just a fluke of nature, but we're harvesting watermelon in November. Not just any watermelon, Golden Honey watermelon. Our other watermelons grew within the appropriate time frame expected from any hot weather crop, but the Golden Honey just whimpered along, producing compact vines but no flowers. Long after we harvested our other watermelons (and just about the time we were planning to pull out the unsuccessful plant) a heat wave came along and…
One of the wonderful and often surprising things about being a blogger is that every once in a while companies send you free stuff. They hope
that you'll review their product and spread the word. Let it be known, if it isn't already, that I never promote things that I don't completely believe in, and I don't get paid to wax rhapsodic
about them.
That said, I was delighted to find ...