I feel really fortunate to have a few opportunities to share tomato talk on the radio...the first tomorrow morning at 10 AM on my garden friend Niki Jabbour's show the Weekend Gardener...the link to listen live is here. I suspect we will spend the 30 minutes talking about tomato successes, issues and challenges.
On Tuesday, at noon, I feel quite honored to be a participant in Frank Stasio's wonderful daily program The State of Things, the live link to which can be found here. It promises to be an interesting show, touching upon seed saving, some stories, and the Durham library seed lending program. Click the link on Tuesday (or listen on WUNC radio).
As far as what's going on in the garden....the cherry tomatoes are ripening - we are picking the first few Mexico Midget, Coyote, Sun Gold (yay!), Lemon Drop and Tiny Tim Yellow, and they are as good as we hoped. We've picked two dwarfs - Sleeping Lady and Iditarod Red - and were really impressed (I really look forward to comparing all of the released dwarfs this year). Sweet Peppers are setting incredibly well, and I actually am thinning out some smaller inner fruit that would end up crushed due to their central location in the plant. We've picked an eggplant from most of our plants, and tonight made the second batch of Bangan Bharta - currently our favorite eggplant recipe. It is incredible how something so easy and relatively basic can be so wonderful.
The bush beans are superb this year, and we are eating them as an appetizer pretty much every night - just blanched for 4 minutes and with a dab of butter, sprinkle of salt, pepper and fresh chives. Beets and beet greens and collards are plentiful. I've planted a second set of bush beans where the lettuce and mustard used to be. The first few Diva cucumbers, growing in the big pot on our deck, have been just delicious...we really love Diva!
The main waiting games are with summer squash, which for some reason aren't putting on very many female flowers, and the larger fruited tomatoes, which isn't surprising - it's simply not time yet. Patience is always required for the heavy hitters.
A few random pics below...enjoy! Hoping your gardens are thriving...just to specify a few of the pics - top row left shows half a dozen of the Green Ghost eggplant project showing some wonderful variation. Second row center is Iditarod Red, a