Vegetable gardening newsletter #7

Hello,

Your peas climb the trellis using little tendrils. It is important to make sure your snow peas are not choking your tomato plants. Simply snip or unwind the tendrils from around the tomato branches. See my video for more details.

Tomatoes and snow peas:

When we put your tomatoes in, we made sure to pinch out the flowers to minimize transplant shock, but you can now let them grow. Pinching out first couple of pepper and eggplant flowers to let the plants grow bigger before they start producing vegetables. You might delay the first harvest a little, but will get more fruit in the end.

The roquette (arugula) is getting pretty spicy. If it is too much to your taste for salads, try cooking it! Spicy roquette is delicious on homemade pizza, chopped up on pasta, or sautéed along with kale and swiss chard as a side dish.

Many of your berries and fruit trees have been in the ground for a month or so now. The trees spend the first month or two using all their energy to grow their root ball. This means that your tree may still not have any leaves. You can check it is still living with a scratch test. Take your thumb nail gently scratch the bark of the tree. If it is green underneath, your tree is doing well. If it is brown, that part of the tree is dead and you should snip it off.

Raspberries and blackberries will take some time to get established as well. They should have a couple of leaves within a couple of weeks, but will not be a full and productive patch until next spring.

Blueberries and strawberries get established pretty quickly and will probably bear fruit this summer. If you are worried about any of your fruit, please let me know and we will be glad to come by and take a look.

The flowers need to be “dead-headed” this means that once the flower is wilted, pinch off the dead flower. This will encourage new flower buds to form. Remember you can use all of our flowers in salads or on desserts. Snow peas and flowers are delicious as well.

Thanks to client Colin Griffin, executive chef at Aldo Group for his fabulous snow pea shoot recipes:

Recipes

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