This Saturday Is the Growing Food Class!

In a photo by Barbara Treves from last weekend's seminar, "Essentials of Vegetable Seed Saving," Gardenmaster David King holds a couple of screens for separating out chaff from seed that's being saved.

This Saturday, the usual first Saturday of the month class, Growing Food In Southern California meets in The Learning Garden on the Chi Patio from 9 AM to Noon.  We'll cover finishing off our cool season gardens and starting our tomatoes and basil for the coming hot months.  The weather should be absolutely delicious for gardening this weekend so we'll spend some time out in the garden planting and checking out the harvest from this last season!  If we have folks with fruit trees we'll show how to best prune fruit trees at this time of year and all the other tasks we need to get out of the way in our gardens!  Remember, if you want a good tomato, pepper and cucumber crop this year, now is the time to start and we'll show you exactly what works!

Class is $25 and you'll probably have some take home material from the class (plants, seeds or harvest!)  Hot tea and coffee will be served - bring your cup! 

Harvest Basket

Red and yellow tomatoes co-mingle with green, yellow and orange peppers that is just a glimpse of our harvest right now! An awesome year of production with tomatoes getting hauled out of the Garden every day! In addition, I have been collecting the yellow banana peppers getting ready to learn how to pickle them this coming Saturday. There are few red jalapenos that I'm going to slice up and dry and the tomatoes, we're just going to eat. There are a bunch more in the Garden that are better for preserving and those will be the ones we roast and freeze (more on that in another post) and make sauce from.

Oddly enough, this has been a lousy year for tomatoes for a lot of nearby gardeners. I'm not sure why that should be so, but we haven't had as good a harvest as this since I started working here in 2002!

My paste tomatoes (San Marino) are being eaten by a mammal. As the remains are being left on the vine, I doubt it is the human mammal, more like squirrels, racoons or something along that line. One portion of corn near the tomatoes has been smashed down, and the corn stalks are all splayed out in all directions. It looks to me like a great fight or some mating took place in the middle of my corn. No dead critters, so I'm thinking the latter. Just don't tell school administration!

david