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Plan Ahead to Grow Quality Veggies in a Fall Garden

Gardening season isn’t over just because summer ends – there are plenty of vegetables well-adapted for planting in the late summer for fall harvest.

Planting a fall garden extends the gardening season and allows you to continue harvesting fresh vegetables long after the summer crops are gone. In fact, many cool season vegetables, including carrots, broccoli, beets, onions, brussel sprouts, spinach, lettuce and cauliflower, produce their best flavor and quality when they mature during cool weather.

Growing a productive fall vegetable garden is easy with advance planning. For instance, you’ll want to plant vegetables that take 60 or longer to mature, such as broccoli and cauliflower, in August, to allow time for harvest before a hard freeze arrives. Faster maturing vegetables, such as leafy greens, can be planted in September for harvest in October. It’s handy to stagger your plantings of leafy greens, such as lettuce, so that the crop doesn’t arrive all at once.

Just like the summer garden, most cool weather vegetables need six or more hours of sunlight daily. Remember, the sun is weaker and the days are shorter in fall, so only plant where light is adequate.

Remember that the key to successful vegetable gardening is planning and preparation. Your garden can provide you with food and fun for the whole family if you put a bit of planning into your choice of fall garden vegetables.

From Russia With Love

Admit it – life is much better with homegrown tomatoes. And make that an heirloom tomato, such as the Caspian Pink variety, and it’s pure heaven.

Sure, most people can’t think beyond shoveling snow during these winter months, but it’s time to start considering which tomatoes you’ll plant come spring. As far as most gardeners are concerned, the more ripe, juicy tomatoes, the better.

If there is anything that will make you feel better in the midst of a never-ending winter, it is the mere thought of home-grown tomatoes.

Heirlooms have withstood the test of time and favorite varieties such as Caspian Pink are among the best tasting tomatoes available. If you’re curious what an heirloom tomato is, generally speaking they are open-pollinated plants that have been in cultivation for more than 50 years. Some varieties are more than 100 years old and have survived only because gardeners carefully saved the seeds year after year.

In contrast, modern hybrid tomatoes were created to be more disease resistant, produce higher yields and better-looking fruit. Some say the taste isn’t as potent as that of an heirloom, but it’s an individual preference.

So yes, heirlooms might be big and sometimes, even a tad ugly, but the payoff is their taste. These tomatoes have an old-time tomato flavor that can’t be topped.

Caspian Pink is a very large beefsteak-type tomato that originated in Russia. It was discovered in Russia after the Cold War ended and features a sweet, flavorful taste. Tomatoes are 10 to 12 ounces each and ripen from the bottom up. By the time the shoulders, or top, of the tomato has turned pink, the flesh is soft and juicy.

It is an indeterminate tomato, which is one of the two types of tomatoes you’ll choose from when planting your garden. The other is determinate.

Indeterminate varieties are vining tomatoes that grow and produce fruit throughout the growing season, until the frost kills them. They require support and pruning and can reach six feet or more in height.

Determinate tomato plants are also known as bush tomatoes and they are compact, usually under four feet tall and do well in containers. They stop growing when the fruit sets and the entire crop ripens close to the same time, then the plant dies.

Once you choose the type of tomato you want to grow, make sure you plant them in soil with good drainage, because too much water can ruin the plants. Use a fertilizer specifically made for tomatoes. With Caspian Pink, you’ll wait just 80 days after planting before harvesting your first delectable fruit.

The true key to growing tomatoes is plain old hard work. But at least you’ll have something delicious to nibble on – your homegrown tomatoes - while you toil away

Pink Paradise

Face it - tomatoes are the jewels of the garden. Even people who grow nothing else usually opt for a few tomato plants.

Although tomatoes were declared vegetables by an act of Congress, botanists call the tomato a fruit because it’s the part of the plant with the seeds inside. And nothing gets attention more than Pink Brandywine heirloom tomatoes with their true tomato taste that purists insist is superior to any hybrid.

Brandywine is a legend with a strong following of gardeners devoted to it. Sure, it’s temperamental, but the flavor of a freshly picked Brandywine is unbeatable. It comes in a range of colors from red to yellow, but the Pink Brandywine’s sweet taste is a favorite and incomparable to anything store bought. It’s considered by many to be the best-tasting tomato in the world. It’s an old Amish variety dating back to 1885.

The Pink Brandywine is one of the greatest tomatoes in the world for slicing and it is one of the most popular tomatoes for home gardens. It’s prized for its flavorful fruit and it’s the flavor standard for homegrown tomatoes. Each tomato is reddish-pink and averages 10 to 16 ounces each.

Now, you may ask, what exactly is an heirloom versus a hybrid?

An heirloom tomato is deeply colored inside, juicy and intensely flavored with a variety of undertones, from sweet to smoky to spicy. While a field-grown, vine-ripened, just-picked hybrid tomato can be delicious, hybrids don't have the variety of flavors that you'll find among heirlooms.

Hybrid tomatoes came were created because, despite the delicious qualities of an heirloom, their thin skin made them hard to transport to market.

Unlike their tougher hybrid counterparts, most heirlooms are delicate, thin-skinned and liable bruise, mash and burst open. They do not ship well, especially if picked close to ripe. So as our country became more industrialized and commercialized in the early 20th century, durable tomatoes became a necessity as they began to be produced on a large scale.

Hybrids were developed that had thicker, tougher skins that could withstand long-distance shipping and that ripened more evenly and predictably. Tomatoes began to be picked green, artificially ripened in storage and shipped across the country for year-round availability.

And so the modern hybrid tomato which now is the only kind of tomato most people in this country have ever eaten was born. And while those grown in back yards and sold at farmers markets still tasted pretty good, mealy, bland grocery store tomatoes became the norm for many people.

The movement back toward heirlooms began in the 1970’s, with regional and sustainable agriculture gaining in popularity. Today, heirloom tomatoes are a popular choice and some upscale grocery stores even stock them, with, again, the Pink Brandywine a favorite.