Planting Out Peppers and a Recipe for Chicken Santa Cruz with Fresh Peppers

A note from Renee: make sure to check out the Renee's Garden Seeds blog later this week for details on the 2009 Renee's Garden Seeds Photo Contest. You can also sign up to receive the monthly e-newsletter and get the details right in your e-mail inbox. To do this, go to www.reneesgarden.com , enter your e-mail address under the "Get Our Newsletter" graphic, then click "go."
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The Renee’s Garden office staff got their hands dirty planting pepper plants into our trial garden’s prepared beds a couple weeks ago.

Harvesting spinach

We’ve been learning the growing process for tomatoes and peppers this season and the pepper seeds that we sowed in March had grown into plants big enough to transplant into the ground. Plus our weather is now nice and warm – perfect for growing lots of delicious peppers.

We’ll be back in a month or so to start harvesting our bounty!

Here's a recipe making good use of peppers from one of Renee's cookbooks, Recipes From a Kitchen Garden.

Chicken Santa Cruz (Printable Recipe Click Here)

The aromatic, subtle flavors of this dish have drawn more raves than many other entrees we've prepared. Slow sauteing brings out the sweetness of the spices, herbs and onions and the rich mellow flavor of the ripe peppers. Please do try it. Don't forget crusty French bread. By the way, leftovers make great sandwiches.

4 boneless chicken breast halves, skinned and cut into 1/2-inch strips
3 tablespoons lemon juice
4 large fresh bell peppers -- use red, yellow, or deep green peppers (or any combination)
4 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 large onions, finely sliced
2 teaspoons whole cumin seed or 1 teaspoon ground
2 teaspoons chopped fresh oregano or 1 teaspoon ground
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh hot chile pepper or 1 teaspoon dried hot pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley or chopped cilantro

Sprinkle chicken strips with lemon juice and set aside. Cut peppers in half and remove seeds and ribs. Cut into 1 1/2-inch-wide strips. In a large skillet, heat the oil. Add garlic and cook one minute on moderate heat. Add the pepper strips, sliced onion, cumin, oregano and chile pepper. Stir the vegetables to coat evenly with oil. Cover and cook over medium heat for 10 minutes. Uncover pan, stir mixture, add chicken strips and stir to distribute them evenly in the vegetable mixture.

Cover skillet again and cook gently for 10 more minutes. Uncover; chicken should be cooked through and vegetable mixture should be tender and very aromatic. Add salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle with chopped parsley or cilantro and serve.

Serves 4 to 6.

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Northeast Trial Garden Journal - by Jay Leshinsky

The Middlebury College student garden interns and I are well into this year's seed trials for Renee's Garden. Our main focus over the 7 years at this location is building soil fertility with compost and green manures. Middlebury College produces tons of compost from food prep materials, leaves, wood chips and cardboard gathered from on campus. We use the compost to enrich our sandy, stony soil.

One of our summer volunteers, Abel is spreading compost on one of our raised beds. The plant growing in the background is yellow sweet clover which we plant for our bees and for soil improvement. This is the second year we trialed our new Gourmet Golden Beets. Golden Beets are one of our main crops and the old varieties were often inconsistent in their germination and yield. Gourmet Golden Beets outperformed all other golden varieties. Our customers love them! There was even great competition from the Dining Service chefs to obtain our beet green thinnings.

Our mesclun lettuce and baby spinach has benefited from the cold, wet spring here in Vermont. Our yields were heavy and the taste superb! This spring we used predominantly Farmer's Market Blend and Monet's Garden for our lettuce and Catalina for our spinach. Two of this summers interns David and Jessie have just harvested the second cutting from our first planting of lettuce and our second planting (to the right in the photo) will be ready in a few days. Once we harvest the mesclun, we wash it in our well water and then spin it dry in our 2 gallon salad spinner.

Molly, one of the other summer interns, is doing some taste testing before she spins the cleaned lettuce.We are getting our first really hot and sunny weather and our warm weather crop are finally getting some good growth. More on those in my next blog.

Don't miss our featured website article for July :
Growing Vertical Vegetables

Renee at the White House

Renee's Garden was part of the Congressional Club's annual First Lady's Luncheon honoring Michelle Obama at the Washington Hilton last month.

This gala annual event, attended by Congressional, Supreme Court and Administration spouses as well as guests from around the country had a theme of "Forever Green", and event co-chair, Betty Ann Tanner, wife of the congressman from Tennessee, invited me to contribute our seeds for attendees. Individual packets of our Farmers Market lettuce and Pesto Basil were part of the beautiful gift bags given every attendee.

Best of all, I was invited to the VIP reception before the affair and had the thrill and honor of meeting Michelle Obama in person. I was also able to make a personal selection of our seeds to give to Michelle for the White House Garden. Michelle was everything I expected -- vibrant, graceful, clearly engaged and enjoying what she is doing. When you speak with her, you have her full attention and feel like you are the only person in the room. The luncheon itself was really fabulous. I was seated at a table quite close to the First Lady and other honorees, so I got to watch her "up close and personal" as she gave a very insightful speech on community service.

The First Lady also recently hosted a harvest party in the White House kitchen garden with the students from Bancroft Elementary to celebrate their hard work. Click here to read the blog post about it on the White House website. The kids harvested lettuce and sugar snap peas and then cooked a lunch from their harvest. More than 90 pounds of produce has been harvested so far from the White House kitchen garden.

Announcing the Hummingbird & Butterfly Contest Winners

The results of the Hummingbird and Butterfly Contest on Renee's blog are in! Congratulations to Jenny in Alaska and to Fae in Rhode Island.

The whole office really enjoyed reading your entries. From sweet peas to sunflowers and from tomatoes to peppers, it's fun to hear your garden favorites.
Here were Jenny and Fae's entries:

Jenny said:
I would love to try these seeds and see if they'd attract Hummingbirds. It's been said that hummingbirds are traveling further North. I know we have them in South East Alaska. I live in Anchorage (South Central, AK) and I think we get them occasionally.

My favorite flowers would be either sweet peas, roses, or lavender. It's just too hard to choose one favorite!
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Fae said:
Hmmm... favorite veggie or flower...

I enjoy having giant sunflowers in my yard, because they attract the goldfinches. It's fun to watch them land on the flowers and pluck out all the seeds (even when they don't leave me any). I'm hoping to have some good ones growing this summer so my son can watch the birds.

Favorite veggie is tomatoes... even though they're not really a veggie. I remember eating them right out of the garden when I was little. Favorite fruit is watermelon. We used to grow those when I was little, too.

I hadn't even realized that you sell seeds! I recently joined the ning site, but haven't had the chance to check it out fully. I'm glad I got the email for this and decided to head on over here!


Thank you to everyone who entered our first blog contest. For those of you who didn't win but still want to plant some hummingbird and butterfly gardens, click here to browse the collections.

In the next blog post, you'll see March's pepper plants make the big move from pots to ground. I'm already anticipating their final resting place in some fiery salsas, soups, and stir-fries.

- Nellie Boonman, Marketing Intern

Attract butterflies and hummingbirds to your garden – Our First Contest!

Although we love earthworms and bees here at Renee's Garden Seeds, there's nothing quite as exciting as catching a glimpse of a hummingbird zipping through your garden, looking for a snack. You can't deny the lift in your spirits when you watch a butterfly crash-land gently onto a bright “Red Sun” sunflower.

So, we thought. Why don't we share our winged friends with our readers?

Contest #1: A Blooming Butterfly and Hummingbird Garden Contest

For our first-ever contest on Renee's Blog, we want to offer each of our two contest winners a butterfly bonus pack and a hummingbird bonus pack. You can grow your very own butterfly and hummingbird gardens.

Here's what they look like:











These are both brand new for this season. Click here to read about these collections.

How does this contest work? This contest is open to our Canadian and US readers. You may enter once anytime before 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Friday, June 5th. The following week, we will select two responses at random, contact the winners, and send them each a butterfly garden and a hummingbird garden.

All you have to do is click on the "comments" link below this article. In the text box, tell us your favorite vegetable or flower and include your name and e-mail address so we contact you. After filling out the box, click the orange "publish your comment" button.

Two winners will be selected at random. The week of June 8th, we'll publish the winners' first names on the blog.


In Other News: Our New Intern!

Also new at Renee's Garden Seeds is Nellie Boonman, the marketing intern (me). I recently graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in Business Administration and Entrepreneurship.

I'm very excited to work with Renee and the entire team here in beautiful Felton, California. The trial gardens are absolutely bursting right now with lettuce and spinach, so everybody in the office goes home with bags of leafy greens in their back seats. Definitely a perk. I've especially enjoyed the Mesclun mixes, which you can order online through our catalog. They're incredibly tasty with an Orange Citrus Dressing and our chopped Delicious Duo scallions.

I'll contribute occasionally to the Renee's Garden Seeds blog, Twitter account, and to the Renee's Garden Seeds Ning community. I look forward to hearing your gardening stories and comments.

Lettuce Days: Fields of Green & Red

Recently we visited Lettuce Field Day at Shamrock Seeds, a premier lettuce breeding company. One of the benefits of our location in Central California is that several of the seed growers we work with are within easy driving distance. Shamrock Seeds hosted us during their “Lettuce Days” open house in their beautiful trial fields in Gilroy, CA.

We lucked out with a perfect spring weather for touring the "living catalog" of Shamrock varieties, existing and under development, with knowledgeable Product Development Manager, Estella Barajas. The trials featured row after row of interesting varieties – from romaines to baby leaf varieties to wasabi arugula. Estella impressed us with her encyclopedic and very precise knowledge of every single variety and her boundless enthusiasm for the details of growing and producing seed for great greens. She showed us how she evaluates the different varieties for form, weight, disease resistance and slow bolting. And taste of course! Renee makes a point of tasting each variety in the field, so we had plenty of opportunity to talk about the various nuances of flavor.

The most exciting find of the day was completely new variety of arugula that tastes amazingly like the spicy wasabi that often accompanies sushi. We didn’t believe it until we tasted it. The first taste is the spicy, peppery flavor of arugula, but then the intense flavor of wasabi hits you. It was a truly uncanny experience discover the tangy, delicious flavor of the wasabi in a salad leaf! We all agreed that there would definitely be a great interest in the market for this new green. It is still in development by Shamrock but we’ll be testing it in our own trial gardens this fall.

Many specialty lettuces also caught our attention, especially a soft, delicate butter lettuce they usually sell mostly to European customers, and the intensely colored red leaf lettuces and mustards that are Shamrock specialties.

On the theme that "everything old is new again", Shamrock has reselected an old home garden favorite, Little Gem lettuce. Renee was especially excited to see and taste both green and red varieties of these old-fashioned little vase- shaped lettuces that qualities of both butterhead and romaine lettuces. Shamrock's breeders have refined this variety to have more crunch, sweetness and heavier heads.

We also were excited about the densely leafed new variety Shamrock is working on called "thousand leaf lettuce." It is the most densely packed l head of leaf lettuce we've ever seen and tastes good too.

Next up will be for us to evaluate these new variety" finds" several times in our own company trials to see if they will perform well for home gardeners before deciding to add them to our Renee's Garden line. There will be many salad meals to come…

-by Sarah Renfro, Renee's Garden Business Manager

Springtime in Seattle - Sue Shecket, webmaster and NW trial gardener

It was an exceptionally long, rough winter here in the Pacific Northwest. We do expect a bit of snow to dust us now and then in Seattle, but this year was the "real deal" , with bitter cold and lots of the white stuff that stuck around for weeks. While we had some fun sledding down our very steep hillside streets, watching people cross country ski downtown, playing bumper cars on the side streets and bemoaning the inability of the city to plow anywhere but the mayor's neighborhood, the novelty wore off very soon and thoughts turned to the sad fate of our more tender plants and trees.

Indeed I did loose a few old favorites to the snow load and deep freeze, but fortunately there is a happy ending to this tale of woe, as the exceptional cold also gave new life to long ago planted and forgotten bulbs. So when spring bloom season finally arrived (and even our Tulip Festival was 2 weeks late), it was spectacular.

Against all odds, my fall planted sweet peas soldiered through and are up and running, and the early spring seeded poppies and larkspur also stayed afloat. I had sowed fava beans as a cover crop in the vegetable beds, and many plants did survive to be turned under and enrich the soil for my April planting of lettuces, greens, brocolli raab, bok choi, radishes, scallions, spinach, peas, chard, kale, carrots and beets.

The raised beds look a bit like a laundry line with row covers over everything to protect the seedlings from heavy rain, digging cats, hungry birds and murauding slugs and snails (an ongoing NW battle). I do start my warm weather crops indoors, and have a good supply of my favorite Sungold tomatoes to set out and share, as well as a sampling of our container varieties. Cherry tomatoes are more reliable in my less than ideal conditions (half day sun, cool nights), but I have had success here with our container eggplant and peppers, so have started Little Prince Eggplant and Baby Belle Peppers as well.

We are already looking forward to our first spring salads and I am, as ever, thrilled to see so many healthy seedlings sprouting in the beds. I'll be watching those nighttime temperatures closely with my seed packets out and ready for sowing lots of flowers and warmer weather crops.

We just published this month's Enewsletter - click to check it out: Add to your "garden ideas" toolbox.