Adri Barr Crocetti

Wake up!  It is time to start your gardens!

Each year Bart and I kick off our garden season with an early morning visit to day one of Tomatomania at Tapia Brothers Farm in Encino. Great name. Great event.

For tomato gardeners the Tomatomania seedling sale is the place to be. Gardeners are presented with a dizzying array of choices. And I do mean dizzying. Hundreds of varieties, thousands of plants, along with herbs, items for soil preparation and fertilizer. This is the time of year to shift into high gear for Spring and Summer gardening.

It is time to clean up the garden area, prepare the soil, decide what to plant and where to put it all, and purchase the plants. We had a ball this morning, looking at the seedlings, chatting with fellow gardeners and listening in on people’s comments about their favorite plants.

I picked up some favorites from last year including Juliet, Ananas Noire, and Sungold. I decided to try some new ones too. Among them are Jaune Flamme, Haley’s Purple Comet (couldn’t resist that one) and Green Envy. Let me say it was hard to choose and harder still to leave all those other little babies behind. Check their web site for a sale near you. If you can not find one, do not despair. They sell seedlings online.

The more I garden the more I am utterly amazed at the tremendous number of choices available to us. I love to grow unusual plants, and so over the years I have settled on a few specialty purveyors. For herb plants look no farther than Goodwin Creek Gardens. They have over 1000 herbs and plants including every herb you can think of and more varieties of lavender, thyme and geranium than I ever knew existed.

If it is peppers you are after, Cross Country Nurseries is the company for you. Again, more plants than you can imagine – hundreds in fact. Their catalogue lists the plants and their culinary uses. Another thing I love about their catalogue is the chart that gives the name and type of pepper, length, width, heat level and country of origin. What more could a gardener possibly ask for?

And finally, never again will you sneak seeds back home in your suitcase. Seeds from Italy is a specialty purveyor of heirloom seeds from Franchi Sementi of Bergamo, and from southern Italy the seeds of a very small company in Andria, Bari. This company is unmatched. Grow these seeds and you will be the talk of your neighborhood. Many of these are things you will never see in an American supermarket. They specialize in traditional heirloom Italian varieties, and lots of them – 9 types of arugula, 14 types of cima di rapa, 7 types of eggplant, 25 varieties of lettuce and 18 types of zucchini! Their catalogue also features growing instructions and recipes. Sign up online for their terrific newsletter.

A gardener’s life is good. I hope you decide to garden this summer. No one says you have to have a huge garden. Just grow something. Anything. Feel the dirt. Plant something, tend it and watch it grow. It’ll taste better than anything you ever bought in a store.

Note: You can click on any picture to see a slide show with even more pictures!

I have no affiliation with any product, manufacturer, or site mentioned in this article.

The first in an ongoing series – Exploring Tomatoes
 

 
WOW!! What a tomato!  Introduced by Thompson and Morgan seed growers in 1992, Sungold is new to me this year.  While at Tomatomania some home gardeners were extolling the plant’s virtues, and am I ever glad I was there to listen in.  “You won’t believe how sweet it is.”  “You will get tons.”  “Pretty hardy.”  That’s what I heard, and it was enough for me.  This tomato is all that and more.

The fruit is borne on long trusses, and each of my Sungold tomatoes weighs between 1/4 and 1/2 ounce.  My plant, which I put in the ground in April is already taller than I am.  They are so sweet you will eat them out of hand, so if you plan to use them in a recipe, set them away from all the snackers in your home!

I hope you will be able to find some Sungolds this season.  Check out your local Farmer’s Markets.  I bet you will get lucky.
 
I have no affiliation with any product, manufacturer, or site mentioned in this article.