Sunday - Noon to 6pm
Monday - Noon to 6pm
Tuesday - Closed
Wednesday - Closed
Thursday - Noon to 6pm
Friday - Noon to 6pm
Saturday - Noon to 6pm
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Now is the Time to Plant these Crops -
We have them all in stock
Plants
Assorted lettuce
Astro arugula
Green Wave mustard
Raspberry plants -- big and beautiful
Kale - 3 varieties
Everbearing, day neutral strawberries
Horseradish - huge plants
Spearmint
Cabbage
Broccoli and Broccoli Rabb
Italian parsley
Nabechan scallions
Russian Comfrey
Hardy Egyptian Walking Onions
Pansies and petunias - both can tolerate any frosts we might still have. Pansies are also edible flowers and turn any salad into a gourmet salad.
Onion sets
Seeds
Bolero pelleted carrot seeds (Hercules and Deep Purple still coming)
Sugar Sprint pea seeds
Super Sugar Snap pea seeds
Reflect spinach seeds
Red Ace beet seeds
Easter Egg radish seeds
D'Avignon radish seeds
Some organic seed potatoes
We also have mycorrhizal fungus spores in stock. Dip your transplants in them and sprinkle some on your seeds when you plant them.
Lawn Care
If you haven't done so already, now is the time to fertilize your lawn -- and overseed with grass seed inoculated with mycorrhizal fungus. Ask for some at our store.
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Our kale plants look beautiful right now. Unfortunately, this pic was taken at night with a flash so it didn't come out that great.
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Growing Better Peppers
The best time for planting peppers is very late May to mid June.
But you can prepare soil and structures for them now.
Nutritional Giants
Peppers have a lot going for them. They're low in calories and are loaded with good nutrition. All varieties are excellent sources of vitamins A and C, potassium, folic acid, and fiber. A ripe pepper actually has 3 times as much vitamin C as an orange.
For gardeners,
they are easy to grow and very productive, right until frost. They also consistently rate as
one of the most important foods to grow or buy organic
because of heavy pesticide use on commercially grown peppers. This is something I don't understand because we rarely have any pest problems when growing them. Of course, ours are healthy plants.
Culinary Giants
Peppers come in all sizes and colors. The genetic diversity is incredible. Some pack incredible heat, some more moderate heat, and others are very sweet. Some are fruity, others have a very floral flavor. You can use them fresh, frozen, dried, or canned. Peppers liven up bland food, making meals more satisfying. A bit of hot pepper powder or dash of hot pepper sauce makes an incredible difference when cooking.
Try this idea next time you make veggie soup (or almost any soup, or dish). Taste the soup, then add a little hot pepper sauce or powder, and taste again. I like to add hot pepper until I just start to taste it. I am not a fan of really hot meals, but I love the extra flavor hot peppers give -- until I start to taste it too much. I don't want it to dominate a dish, I want it to accent the other flavors. I find this can also cut down on salt use.
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While people talk more about our tomatoes, we are even prouder of our peppers. I have grown hundreds of pepper varieties and the variation in productivity and flavors is amazing.
I walked over to two women who were looking at our peppers a couple of years ago, and asked them if they needed help. They said they were just taking time, absorbing the varieties -- it was the best assortment they had ever seen.
Peppers are very versatile.
They can be used in a variety of dishes and preserved in many ways. We usually freeze the sweet ones and dry the hot ones. We also pickle and can both. We use frozen peppers in soups, chili, stews, and stir fries all winter. It is worth the time because they have so much more flavor -- like garden tomatoes. Just rinse them off -- cut them up, and freeze them. We dice some for soups and chili and cut others into slices for stir fries. We usually freeze them in 2 cup packages so we know how many to pull out of the freezer for a particular recipe.
I was giving a seminar on using garden produce and opened a freezer to show how we package peppers for freezing. People said they could smell them 6 ft away, When was the last time you could smell a pepper at all -- much less peppers frozen for months and from a distance?
We dry hot peppers and grind them into a powder in our Vitamix. Just make sure you do this in a well ventilated place, so you don't breathe the fumes. Last year, we made a hot pepper powder using 16 different types of hot peppers.
We also use a lot of peppers in canning sauces, relishes, and pepper rings.
Peppers are attractive plants that look good all summer.
They can even be incorporated into flower beds.
We have grown pepper plants 8 feet tall, and we have grown almost every pepper type available. Like tomatoes, with some experience, you will know the best way to support the different varieties since they vary so greatly in plant size. The following is a short list of the types of peppers we will have for sale this year.
Sweet bell peppers -- several colors
European frying peppers -- several colors
Mini peppers
Cubanelle peppers
Banana peppers
Ancho-Pablano peppers
Jalapeno peppers
Pepperoncini peppers
Serrano peppers
Fresno peppers
Hot Cherry peppers
Thai chili peppers
... and more!
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The most popular pepper type we carry are these European types (pic above). They are often called European frying types because they have a thin, crisp skin that holds up well to cooking -- unlike bell peppers which get soggy when cooked.
During the summer, our produce customers greatly prefer these types. Actually, we sell very few bell peppers because of texture and flavor improvements from other types.
These other types also are very productive and easy to grow.
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Grow them in blocks, not rows
Unlike tomatoes, cukes and squash, peppers like to be grown closer together. They enjoy the higher humidity and as the canopy begins to grow together, it protects the fruit from sunscald (pic on right).
Sunscald is a common problem with peppers. It happens when plants genetically don't produce a good protective canopy -- or culturally when grown in rows and the sun hits the fruit.
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We use our same Garden Arches system for peppers -- only stretch the netting horizontally. We add another layer of netting about every 12-16 inches. The peppers simply grow through the netting and the branches (loaded with peppers) are supported by the netting. You might think these supports were too high, but the peppers in two beds actually out grew them. No problem, we just raised the adjustable supports higher.
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Here, you can see a closer look at how we inter-plant peppers and lettuce. When the plants start to get crowded, we harvest the lettuce (center row first) and let the peppers continue to grow. We doubled our crops using the temporarily empty space between the young peppers. Within a week, the peppers were touching and soon completely filled out the beds. At this point, the peppers are about ready for another layer of netting.
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Here you can see a second layer of netting. Unfortunately these short arches were overgrown by the peppers. When the support structure doesn't fit, it means more labor or broken branches full of peppers. We just added the legs to the arches to make them taller.
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We also use our fiber pots to grow peppers. We use the same horizontal netting for support and still grow the plants relatively close.
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Peppers are very heavy feeders
Years ago, I read a gardening column where a so-called expert answered a question that asked, why their peppers grew into large plants, they bore very few fruits. He answered that peppers should be fed a high nitrogen fertilizer when young and switch to a low nitrogen, and lower amount of fertilizer when they begin to mature and flower.
This was horrible advice and he completely misdiagnosed the problem. I hardly know where to start in rebutting his answer.
First of all, studies show that as peppers begin to flower, half the nitrogen is drained from their leaves -- so they actually need more nitrogen fertilizer when they begin to flower. I used to tell people that they could expect 3 harvests of fruits per ear. When we began to fertilize more, we started harvesting ripe peppers
every week until frost. One year, when keeping count, we picked 142 sweet peppers from one plant alone.
The expert's answer should have been that the consumer probably grew the wrong variety.
Variety selection is crucial in peppers
Older, open pollinated pepper varieties can only set fruit under a narrow range of temperatures. The fruit aborts when temperatures get above 90 degrees or below 50 degrees. This is fine for climates like California, but bad for Ohio growers.
One problem with high quality peppers is seed cost. Older, open-pollinated varieties cost a few hundred dollars per lb. Modern hybrids can cost tens of thousands of dollars per lb. Guess which seeds sell out faster -- the expensive ones. Because of the drastically improved yields, and improved disease resistance, they are much more cost effective for farmers to grow.
But when you buy plants from a big greenhouse, or seeds off seed rack, it is hard for them to justify spending extra on better seed varieties -- especially when consumers don't know the difference. You have to sell thousands more plants just to get your seed cost back.
Like with all veggies, prepare your soil well
Peppers, like all veggies grow best in a fertile, loose, well-drained soil. We use rice hulls and pine bark soil conditioner to loosen soils. If we don't have peas or clover growing in our pepper planters, we topdress with compost before planting to inoculate the soil. We mulch with clover, peas, or straw when planting.
A note on fertilizing -- Years ago, we could see evidence of early nitrogen deficiency in some of our peppers -- just as they were beginning to flower (of course). We tried several different fertilizers to see which would correct he deficiency quickest because until the deficiency was corrected, they would stop making new growth. We used chemical and liquid organic high nitrogen soluble fertilizers (both foliar and soil drench), and our dry organic fertilizer.
Growth and flowering resumed fastest where we used our dry organic fertilizer. My take on this was that while the liquids should have been absorbed quicker, there wasn't enough nitrogen absorbed from a liquid dose to correct the problem where the dry released a little more everyday -- as the plants needed it.
Soon, their growth continued -- but we lost more than a week's growth and harvest by not sticking to our fertilizing schedule of every two weeks.
Like a soluble lawn fertilizer, soluble garden fertilizers leach out of the soil before they can be fully utilized. This means lees fertilizer for your lawn or garden, wasted money, and more water pollution as the soluble fertilizer always ends up in lake and streams (causing algae growth). Soluble fertilizers also have a negative effect on soil biology.
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These peppers are so good, just looking at the picture makes my mouth water. They have a very fruity, sweet flavor. We sell a lot of these in the summer because kids like them so much.
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The last, and best, varieties of grapes are coming out of South America now.
The red grapes are especially good -- Crimson Seedless -- my favorite, sweet and crisp.
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Just when we thought these were done, we got a few more cases.
All of the citrus is still going strong.
We have these and two varieties of seedless mandarins.
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The Durondeau pear was originally cultivated in the garden of M. Durondeau, in the village of Tongre-Notre-Dame, Belgium in 1811. It is very sweet with a crisp texture reminiscent of an apple.
Argentinian agronomists have been working for several years to identify and cultivate promising new – and reintroduce old - varieties for the organic market. We are excited to be able to offer organic Durondeau pears.
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Kale Rabb or Kale Buds The
buds, along with the thin, flexible stem tips that bear them, are sweet, tender, and not at all bitter.
Kale buds only appear the second year of kale growth so they are rare and a gourmet item.
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26273 Detroit Road
Westlake, Ohio
440-899-2740
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