Recently, I harvested my first potatoes of the season. It’s one of my favorite gardening "chores." As silly as it may sound, to me it’s like a treasure hunt, running my hands through the dark earth in search of jewels.
 Digging for treasure in the potato bed.
Yesterday I harvested my first potatoes of the season. It’s one of my favorite gardening “chores.” As silly as it may sound, to me it’s like a treasure hunt as I run my hands through the soil in search of purple and red jewels in the dark earth.
This year’s crop includes purple-skinned Caribe and red-skinned Reddale. In addition to the potatoes in my vegetable garden, I’m also growing them in a Grow Bed and in some Grow Bags. If yesterday’s harvest is any indication, I’ll be swimming in ’taters at the end of the season.
As much as I love potatoes, I can only eat so many of them right now. Ditto beets, carrots, and turnips. Fortunately, root crops are a humble lot. They're content to wait until the prima donnas of summer -- tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers -- have passed their prime. Wait, that is, as long as you store them properly.
Back when farm families needed to store enough vegetables to get them through the winter, they built root cellars, where crops could be kept moist and consistently cool. If your goals are more modest, try storing some of your root crops in a Root Storage Bin. The wire sides allow for good air circulation and the burlap liner keeps out the light, both of which are important for extended shelf life. Potatoes can be stored loose, right in the liner. To store carrots and beets, fill the liner with moist sand and layer the vegetables inside.
To learn more about storing root crops, as well as onions, garlic and winter squash, read the article on keeper crops.
We were sad to hear of the death of Charlotte Valbert, one of our Garden Crusaders, who lead the effort to reclaim a blueberry garden in South Tacoma, WA. There are more than 20 acres of lovingly reclaimed, mature blueberry plants, and every one of those berries is free for the picking.
 Charlotte and I with two of Blueberry Park's most dedicated volunteers.
Each of our Garden Crusader winners is someone very special, doing something amazing in his or her community. In the fall of 2008 I spent the good part of a day with Garden Crusader Charlotte Valbert of Tacoma, Washington.
Charlotte had agreed to give me a tour of Blueberry Park, the project for which she'd received the award. Though the park was just a few blocks from her house, it took almost an hour to get there. Charlotte seemed to know everyone we passed — or, I should say, didn't pass. She pulled over about every 200 feet to talk with one person or another about a pending issue at City Hall or an upcoming clean-up event.
Driving up and down the streets of rough-and-tumble South Tacoma, I saw for myself the dearth of trees, lawns and open space. When we finally arrived at Blueberry Park, it was an oasis of green.
Of course, that neighborhood tour was no accident. At 80-years-young, Charlotte was always working it. She had a vision and she made it a mission. It took her eight years of lobbying city officials and rallying more than 2,000 volunteers to turn 27 acres of tangled brush into a park for her neighbors. There are now shade trees and picnic tables, and places for kids to run around on the grass. But the main attraction is blueberries. There are more than 20 acres of lovingly reclaimed, mature blueberry plants, and every one of those berries is free for the picking.
Charlotte was a really cool woman and so deserving of the award. We were very sad to hear of her passing on Monday, Aug. 16. The Tacoma News Tribune has dozens of tributes to Charlotte — a beloved member of her community, who believed that everyone deserved access to the beauty of nature and to fresh, healthy food.
If you find yourself with more vegetables than time, read my list of super-quick, after-work solutions that I use to save some of summer's bounty for cold winter days. 
This year, we're growing an all-pepper bed as part of our Kitchen Garden Planner designs. This means we'll have lots of peppers to preserve for winter stir-fries, salads and sandwiches.
Vegetables That Can Be Preserved Easily and Quickly
- Peppers
- Tomatoes
- Herbs
- Beets
- Carrots
- Berries
- Onions
- Potatoes
- Garlic
- Winter Squash
If you find yourself with an abundance of vegetables, there are several ways to handle the harvest.
One of the best parts of summer is having an abundance of fresh food from the garden. But that very abundance becomes stressful toward the end of the season when my before- or after-work strolls reveal perfectly ripe and delicious vegetables about to go to waste.
Some weeks I just can't find the time to can tomatoes, make a batch of salsa or chili, or make jelly, jam or pickles. Maybe I should plant a smaller garden, you say? Well … I can't. I could probably skip the eggplant and tomatillos and Swiss chard altogether, but they're like old friends. I'm always glad to see them and I'd miss their distinctive form and leaves and flowers and fruit. I could surely get by without so many tomato and pepper plants, but they are so robust and so generous and so happy in my garden that come spring I just can't reduce the number I plant.
If you, too, find yourself with more vegetables than time, read my list of super-quick, after-work solutions that I use to save some of summer's bounty for cold winter days.
A salsa recipe that's super easy and has a distinctive texture and flavor. The best part: It only has six ingredients.
 Tomatillo-Chipotle Salsa
 Most varieties of tomatillos are still green when they're ripe. Once the bottom of the papery lantern has split open, they're ready to be picked.
 It's not unusual for one tomatillo plant to produce as many as 100 fruits.
 Our gas grill was broken when I made this salsa, so I tossed the tomatillos in olive oil and then roasted them in a 425 degree oven for about 30 minutes. I lined the baking sheet with a silicone mat so it was easy to scrape all the juices into the bowl.
 The recipe calls for roasted garlic, so I put some garlic cloves in the oven at the same time.
 When you puree the roasted tomatillos and garlic it gets nice and thick. Once you add the chipotle peppers, the color will darken to what you see in the photo at the top of the page. Start with just one large chipotle pepper and a tablespoon of adobo. You might find (as I did) that it's plenty.
 Last ingredient is the cilantro. I like to chop mine by hand so the pieces are not too small. And I recommend just stirring it in.
I’ve grown tomatillos before, but it’s been a few years. The plants are always so messy and I never managed to figure out a good use for the fruit. I’m not exactly sure why I gave them another go this year, but I'm sure glad I did.
The solution to the messy part was this: When I set my two tomatillo plants out into the garden, each one got its own tomato cage. The plants haven’t stayed completely within their cages, but they’re mostly under control.
The answer to the second problem was a fantastic tomatillo salsa recipe from Mark Miller’s Great Salsa Book. The book has been on my shelf for years, but I hadn’t tried the recipe for Tomatillo Chipotle Salsa. It's super easy and is a deliciously different texture and flavor from others. When you taste the finished product it’s hard to believe it contains only six ingredients and no tomatoes!
Hint: I’ve always been unsure about when tomatillos are ripe. It turns out they’re considered ripe as soon as they have filled out enough to burst through the bottom of their papery covering. For the variety of tomatillos that I’m growing (Toma Verde), this happens when the fruit is still totally green. If the paper lanterns begin to yellow, that’s OK, but once the fruit inside yellows, it’s past its prime.
Here’s the recipe. In the book it says serve with red meat or pork. I don't eat a lot of meat, but I’ve been enjoying it with chips, on eggs, with beans and rice and with chicken.
Chipotle Tomatillo Salsa
By Mark Miller, Great Salsa Book, Ten Speed Press 1994
- 1 pound tomatillos (about 15), blackened and roughly chopped
- 1 large clove roasted garlic
- 1/2 teaspoon sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 4 chipotle chiles en adobo
- 2 tablespoons adobo sauce
- 1/3 chopped fresh cilantro
Place the tomatillos, garlic, sugar, and salt in a food processor or blender. Blend until mostly puréed. Add the chipotles, adobo sauce, and cilantro leaves and blend briefly, leaving the salsa just a little textured.
Variation: Add more chipotles for a more picante salsa.
Serving suggestions: With red meat or pork
Yield: About 2 cups
We keep coming up with new ways to use our Grow Bags. Sarah, our display garden manager, wanted to try growing melons in the Potato Bag. Melons love heat, and she thought the black fabric of the bag would warm the soil.
We keep coming up with new ways to use our Grow Bags. Sarah, our display garden manager, wanted to try growing melons in the Potato Bag.
Melons love heat, and she thought the black fabric of the bag would warm the soil. To make it even more cozy, she added a Tomato Teepee, which has insulating, water-filled cells. A Tomato Ladder provides support for the growing vine. The best part is, you put the whole thing together at planting time and leave it in place throughout the season. Old stockings can be used to create slings to support the ripening melons.
So far, the experiment has been a success. We already have one large melon ripening on the vine, with others on the way. Because melons do best with regular watering and good drainage, it's important to monitor moisture levels. Don't let the pot dry out.
Any kind of melon would work, though small varieties — such as charentais — would be more suitable. Next year, we'd like to try a small watermelon.
— David Grist
Online Content Coordinator, Gardener's Supply
If you can grow vegetables in less space, what about flowers? Our new cutting garden plans show you how it can be done. 
During the summer months, we like to keep a fresh bouquet of flowers in our reception area. I cut this bouquet from one of our two cutting gardens and just plunked it into a vase. No flower-arranging skills required!
I planted the beds in early May, using the wooden planting grid from our Square Foot Garden Kit to measure out the rows. Poly-coated steel planting grids would work equally well.
The appeal of a cutting garden is abundance: having lots of flowers so you don't miss the ones you cut, and having enough colors, shapes and sizes to compose unique and interesting arrangements from early summer right to frost.
The thing about cutting gardens is that they usually require a large amount of space. For many gardeners that's a problem. I wondered if we could design a cut-flower garden that would deliver an abundance of blooms, yet could be squeezed into just about any size yard.
We brought the same by-the-foot thinking to the cutting garden as we brought to the vegetable garden (in our Kitchen Garden Planner), and came up with two planting plans that we are growing in our Burlington, VT, display gardens. One of the gardens is 7 ft. x 7 ft. and one is 7 ft. x 8 ft. There's nothing special about those dimensions — it's just the size beds we had available.
The gardens have been wildly successful. They look pretty (and are always busy with bees and butterflies), but the real success is the amount of flowers they're producing. The bouquet in the photo is from our first cutting in early July.
I included cutting-garden favorites (familiar and not-so-familiar) that would generate lots of flowers over a long season. For details, take a look at the Cutting Garden Plans. Though both of these gardens are in raised beds, the plans would work just as well in a regular garden.
For more information, read Feed Your Soul: Plant a Cutting Garden. Stay tuned for more information about some of the unusual flowers growing in these beds.
We started picking flowers less than eight weeks after planting. Here’s the garden in mid-July.
A top-quality hose is a worthwhile investment. It ensures that you can get the job done efficiently and with ease.
 These sturdy hoses are made of rubber and have metal fittings.
The hot weather this summer has meant lots of watering. I recently spent most of a day going to my landscape clients to make sure their gardens and new plantings were well-watered. Using timers, sprinklers, soakers and hundreds of feet of hose, I had four new gardens getting watered by 9 a.m. Tops on the list was a woodland planting of six dozen ferns.
It got me thinking about hoses. When I take care of peoples' gardens, I bring my own hoses. Reason: Homeowners buy cheap hoses. And they are, well, cheap. They tangle easily, they kink and they leak. Cheap hoses give watering a bad name. They turn a garden task into a tedious chore.
So, make life better with a decent hose. When you shop, don't go by price. Go for quality. You can expect to spend a dollar or two per linear foot. Here's what I look for:
- Metal fittings are best. They hold up better than plastic. I like our Colorful Rubber Hoses.
- The hose should have some heft when you pick it up. Yes, there are lightweight hoses, which are especially good for small gardens and people who have trouble managing a heavy hose. The same rules on price apply for the lightweight models: a buck or two per square foot. Our Super Slim Lightweight Hose weighs less than half as much as a conventional hose, yet is built to last with industrial spring guards at each end and chrome-plated, solid brass fittings.
- Make sure the female end of the hose has a good washer in place. While you're shopping, buy a packet of washers. They wear out after a few seasons and the fitting loses its seal. A new washer is all that's needed to fix it.
- Buy an on-off valve for the end of the hose. That way, you have control of the water at the end of the hose as you switch from sprinkler, to watering wand to hose-end sprayer.
- Store your hose in a frost-free location during the winter.
Remember, though, that even a decent hose can be a bit ornery. No hose is "kink-free," a term I think is right up there with "deer-proof". But, a good hose will kink a lot less often. Well-placed hose-guides will make things easier, too. And, when you're coiling the hose at the end of the task, remember that it's much easier when the hose is not charged. In other words, the water is off and you've released the pressure.
— David Grist
Online Content Coordinator, Gardener's Supply
Our hedge of blueberries attracts birds from all around. Unfortunately, the birds leave little fruit for the gardeners -- until now. Our custom-made bird barrier ensures that the crop is secure.
 The border in springtime.
 The 2010 blueberry crop, safe under the Bird Netting.
Several years ago, we planted a long row of blueberries to mark the edge of our display garden. The area had always been planted with daffodils, so it was glorious in springtime, but sort of dull after that. To add some multi-season interest, we planted blueberries: creamy white springtime flowers, beautiful foliage in the fall, interesting branches in the winter and, of course, delicious fruit.
The birds were quick to discover this new planting, so we rarely enjoyed the summer bounty. For a few years we thought, well, the hedge is a good example of creating backyard habitat for wildlife.
This year, we tried something different. Call us selfish, but a few weeks before the fruit got ripe, we set up a quick and easy bird barrier, made with 7-foot bamboo poles and bird netting. We lashed the poles together to create teepees for the row-ends and V-shapes for the center. Then, we draped the structure with netting. Earth Staples hold the net in place.
The results have been delicious.
"This is the first year we haven't lost the entire crop to the birds," says Sarah, who manages the display gardens. "Two big bags of berries are already in the freezer."
For more information, read Backyard Berries and Perennial Fruits and Vegetables for the Edible Landscape.
— David Grist
Online Content Coordinator, Gardener's Supply
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