Today in Our Garden: huge yellow heirloom tomatoes! #GardenCuizine #gardenchat

Today in Our Jersey Garden

Well, I took my eye off our ripening huge heirloom tomatoes for a day and two whoppers got over ripe. Harry sliced into our biggest one before I had a chance to weight it. It may have been 2 pounds! The other shown in the photo above, weighed 1 lb. 8 oz. - wow! This breaks our record of 1.2 lbs. from last year. 

Needless to say we've been enjoying tomatoes on everything you can think of. For lunch today, we ate tomato sandwiches while watching hummingbirds visit Coronado Hyssop* and their feeders. This morning, we enjoyed Harry's heirloom tomato and cheese omelets for breakfast. Last night, we had tomatoes in salad at dinner. Tonight, I'm sure we'll add tomatoes to something, perhaps a simple tomato basil salad or tomato peach salsa. 

Try growing your own organic fruits and veggies for quality nutrition and fresh food, all which make gardening such a worthwhile adventure. We grow all our tomatoes from collected seeds from the largest tomatoes. The huge yellow heirloom shown in the above photo is most likely Yellow Brandywine.

Photos Copyright (C)2014 Wind. All rights reserved.
*LINK TO MY DAVE'S GARDEN ARTICLE: HUMMINGBIRD MAGNET: CORONADO HYSSOP

Today in Our Garden * Grape Jelly time! #GardenCuizine #gardenchat

Today in Our Garden

South Jersey
USDA Zone 7a (formerly zone 6b)

August 9, 2014

Harry picked a colander full of organic red grapes this morning. We plan on making grape jelly. Also, we finally spotted a few more swallowtail butterflies this morning. This year we haven't seen as many butterflies as we usually see - have you?

Hummingbirds are more active at the feeders now, and flowers are blooming all over the place, except for dahlias and goldenrod. We noticed meadows of yellow goldenrod blooming now in the Adirondacks, which is further north. Here at home, even Mom pulled out her cell phone camera to snap a few flower photos this morning.

Some of our NJ blooms include:

• Buddleia (the few we have left after die back from last winter)
• Sunflowers (from bird seed)
• Limelight hydrangea (shown next to Harry in top photo)
• Green-Headed Coneflower, Rudbeckia laciniata (yellow blooms shown)
  
• Coronado hyssop (my new hummingbird favorite! check out my Dave's Garden article Hummingbird favorite: Coronado Hyssop) 

greeter at the garden gate

• Four o'clocks, Zinnias, red Cannas, Cosmos
• Hostas, Hibiscus
• Apple mint, Phlox, Black-eyed Susans
• Salvias (including lady in red, Yvonne's, black and blue)

yesterday's harvest

The veggie garden is full of heirloom tomatoes, basil, potatoes, chia and both sweet and hot peppers. 

We have the BIGGEST TOMATO that I've ever grown or seen ripening on the vine now. It's a gigantic yellow heirloom tomato. An award winner for sure. All our tomatoes were grown from saved seeds from the largest tomatoes of the previous year. Guess it works!

We're looking forward to seeing the actual weight of our largest heirloom tomato ever along with large, dinner plate dahlia blooms - all coming soon.

Hope you are having a happy and healthy summer

Related Links
Homemade Reduced Sugar Grape Jelly
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail
Photos and blog post Copyright (C)2014 Wind. All rights reserved.

Today in Our Garden #GardenCuizine #FIGS on the way!

Today In Our Garden

South Jersey
USDA Zone 7a (formerly zone 6b)

Figs - finally on the way! At last, after years of very slow growth, our little stick of a fig tree is showing signs of nutritious figs. Last year I know I spotted some too, but suddenly they disappeared. Hopefully, the squirrels or birds don't eat these before we do. 

Our Ficus carica was purchased at a local garden center over 5 years ago. I don't have a record of the identification of our fig tree. It could be 'Chicago Hardy', 'Celeste', or 'Brown Turkey' fig. I don't think it's 'Celeste' though, since the fig tree has not been fast growing or shrub-like. In fact, it's been the opposite, slow growing with tree-like form and little branching out. It doesn't die to the ground either in the winter like I read Brown Turkey fig trees do. We may be better able to ID the tree by the size of the ripe fruits.

As you may know from previous blog posts, we've been attempting and planning to propagate winter hardy figs from both cuttings and air layering. Stay tuned for updates on propagating figs.

April Showers bring May flowers...but wait...it's June!!
We sure have had plenty of rain for June. How about you? Here in NJ, we're expecting even more thunder storms and rain for the next several days. New Jersey may go down in history as having the wettest June ever. Luckily, so far we haven't seen damage from too much rain. On the contrary, all our gardens are green, lush and the blooms are absolutely beautiful.

Happy and Healthy Gardening!

Harlequin hydrangea

Related Links

Uncommon Nutrition from the Common Fig

Blog post and photos Copyright (C)2013 Wind. All rights reserved.