Season's end - with disappearing melons

Despite an epidemic of late blight in the Northeast this summer, it was a very good season for our trial garden here in Vermont at the Middlebury College Organic Garden…and the season hasn't quite ended yet even though it's early December and we still have no snow cover! Although most of the garden beds are planted with cover crops, our plantings of Lacinato kale and Catalina spinach keep on producing. A nice balance of ample rainfall and sunny days keep them re-growing after each picking. They seem to get sweeter and sweeter with each frost.

Much of the Northeast was devastated by late blight on tomatoes this summer. Lush tomato plants would turn black and die almost overnight. We were spared late blight on our tomatoes -our micro-climate and topography helped a great deal. We are on a south-sloping, windy knoll with well drained (and very stony) sandy loam soil, situated far from any other gardens or farms that grow vegetables. When farms 2 miles away got 3 inches of rain in a few hours, we got 1 inch. Although we did get early blight which affected the lower leaves on our tomato plants, our Sungold cherry tomatoes still produced a fine crop.

It was a fine summer for Endeavor pickling cucumbers. In a year when so many people needed help from the food shelf, our pickling harvest was a favorite at our local food shelf. Some also went to Weybridge House, Middlebury's environmental dorm where the students had a goal of eating locally (food grown within 100 miles of the campus) for the school year. Summer nights were full of the smells and tastes of their preserving efforts. Besides cucumber pickles, favorites were "dilly" beans (using our Slenderette and Rattlesnake green beans), pickled Super Sugar Snap peas and even pickled green cherry tomatoes.

The great mystery of this summer was the "disappearing watermelon". With great anticipation, the interns and I were really looking forward to enjoying our crop of sweet Rainbow Sherbet watermelons. As the melons neared perfect ripeness, they mysteriously started disappearing. We would arrive in the morning to find a melon missing from its spot in the patch and a neatly cut stem as its reminder.

This phenomenon coincided with the return of students to campus for the fall semester. Through the student grapevine, we heard that some students thought these tasty treats were there for students to pick and enjoy whenever they got the urge. So it was watermelon connoisseurs rather than vandals who took the melons!

We got the word out: we would have ripe melon available for each and every student who volunteered to work at the garden. Our volunteer numbers jumped up as we cut up the just picked melons at each day's break time. Those melons were the source lots of smiles and great discussions as we all ate together.

- Jay Leshinsky

Our multi-talented photographer

Do you ever wonder who takes all the pictures featured on the Renee’s Garden Seeds online catalog? With hundreds of trial varieties to shoot, it’s certainly a challenge, but it’s a dream job for our seasoned photographer Karen Bailey, who has worked for Renee’s Garden Seeds for the past five years. She sat down with me one recent sunny fall afternoon to share a little bit about her life and art.

Not only does Karen take great pictures, but she also is a painter and musician who plays the ukulele and the banjo in a Bluegrass/Cajun/Celtic/Jazz/Pop band called Relative Insanity. “We sound a lot like the music from the film ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’,” she says, describing the band which includes her brother-in-law, sister and cousin.

"I never met an instrument I didn’t like, except for the piano. That’s just one I don’t play,” she added. “All I ever wanted to do growing up was to play music with my sister, and now the whole family gets together to jam -- it's great.” Karen's husband Bob is an accomplished amateur luthier who makes the instruments she plays as well as fine custom instruments for other musicians.

Karen graduated from San Jose State with a B.S. in Graphic Design and has been painting for over 30 years. Her first career was as a biological illustrator and her work was published in numerous biology texts and professional journals. Then, in the 1990’s, Karen turned her attention to fine art and plein-air painting and her work appeared in diverse galleries, in both Southern California and as far north as Mendocino, California.

In recent years, she has developed a strong interest in digital photography and has taken a lot of courses in digital effects. This started her in a new direction, combining oil paintings with photography to create mixed media paintings and handmade books.

We're proud that Karen brings these considerable and diverse artistic talents to Renee's Garden as our trial garden and web photographer, enabling her to incorporate a unique artistic aesthetic into her photographic style.

Announcing the 2009 Photo Contest Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the 6th Annual Renee's Garden Photo Contest. We received so many beautiful entries and enjoyed seeing them all. Thank you to everyone who entered the contest -- we are sending out your complimentary seed packets this week.
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1st Place Winner: "Super Bush Tomatoes"

-Katie Neumann, Woodland, CA

"I took this photo of one of my Super Bush Tomatoes (GREAT for small space gardening!!). I had just finished watering my garden and was struck by the beauty of this particular tomato. The contrast of colors between the red tomato and green leaves in the early evening light really caught my eye.

The past few years I have enjoyed starting my plants from seed. There is a huge difference in the quality of your plants when you start them from great seeds—my friends, family and even our chickies can attest to that! I always give away my extra plants to friends and family and it has been fun to see them have great success in their own gardens."

Second Place Winner - Asclepias Bright Wings
- Liane Doxey, Brookfield, IL

Liane puts it simply: "This one is a family favorite."

Second Place Runner-Up - The Joy of Sweet Peas
Shirley Ward, Big Sur, CAf

 "Wonderful sweet peas! Chiffon Elegance, Royal Wedding, Regal Robe,Queen of the night, Watermelon, April in Paris, Painted lady, Mary Lou Heald, Zinfandel, and Cupanis Original.

"This is a 60 foot row of fragrant and delicious blossoms."
Shirley is from Esalen Farm and Garden

Kids Contest Winners

JoAnne Wallace, Hershey, PA
These kids know how to cool off: popsicles and the shade provided by an enormous "Trombetta di Albenga" Italian summer squash plant.

Saniya with Trombetta Squash

"We love your seeds and your company.
We have a half acre of edible garden for our restaurant and just ripped out our lawn in our new house to plant the garden where these photos come from. Saniya loves the garden and I love that she eats anything from it.   She spends the day chewing up basil leaves, green coriander seeds and picking cherry tomatoes.  She also loves freshly pulled beets and radishes (I have to remind her that they taste better with the dirt washed off!)."  
-Kelly Majid, Berkeley, CA,
(Their restaurant is Zatar Restaurant in Berkeley, CA)

Click below to view and download the desktop wallpapers made from our winners' pictures.

To add as your desktop wallpaper, click on the image below to get the full-size, right click on the full-sized image and click "set as desktop background."
Desktop Wallpaper - Asclepias Bright Wings  and Super Bush Tomato

Renee's Seeds "do the show" in Chicago

-by Nellie Boonman, RGS Marketing Assistant

A few weeks ago I took the opportunity to venture back to my hometown, Chicago, to work at the Independent Garden Center show at Navy Pier Exposition Center. Renee and I met up with our East Coast sales manager Jay (who also works as our Vermont trial gardener), to set up our booth. The empty, carpeted space would transform into the home for Renee’s Garden Seeds for three busy days.

If you’ve never been to a trade show, just imagine a space the size of 2 or 3 football fields filled with enormous cardboard boxes, tubing, wire and forklifts. Within a matter of hours, the entire place transformed into a wonderland for gardeners, filled with fire-breathing pots, enormous gushing fountains, and all sorts of plants, trees and every kind of garden tool. It's the place to see the latest and greatest in products for the garden, and we saw a lot of people looking like kids in a candy store.

Companies exhibited at the 2009 Independent Garden Center show for several reasons: to talk to their current wholesale customers, to introduce new products, and to find prospective new independent garden center customers. Attending the wholesale-only show were buyers and owners from garden centers and nurseries from all across the country. Because the IGC is specifically targeted to independent garden centers; no discount or "big box stores" enter in the picture. These independent garden center buyers look hard for products (like Renee's Garden seeds) that help differentiate them from their "big-box" competition. Many retailers also brought their families – after all, many independently run garden centers are family-owned so it’s only natural to bring the kids along!

Renee’s Garden showcased several of our handsome Garden Trellis and Garden Gate displays filled with our watercolor seed packets. For seed companies, well-designed and attractive displays are absolutely crucial. Seed packets aren’t like garden hoses – you can’t just stack them on a shelf or expect people to rummage through a bin to find what they want. Buyers, bloggers (like Mr. Brown Thumb and Linda from Garden Girl) and press people stopped at our booth to “shop” our displays and to look at Renee’s new varieties for 2010. They asked questions about our seeds and talked with Renee, who is a wealth of information and suggestions for encouraging and supporting home gardeners.

Being in Chicago also gave us an opportunity to enjoy some great restaurants and the wonderful atmosphere of this exciting city. We also attend several other major garden trade shows across the country during the year - an excellent opportunity to meet our customers and keep abreast of innovations and trends in the garden world.

It's raining Summer Squash in Seattle

-by Sue Shecket, webmaster and NW trial gardener

Now that our reputation for cool wet summers and grey skies has been ruined, I'm happy to report that this sunny warm Seattle summer has provided me with an excellent tan and a bumper crop of heat loving veggies. Of course my bounty has been shared with my neighbors and friends, but at a certain point, they start to hide behind the curtains when I'm spotted roaming the street with another bag of summer squash.

Fortunately, Renee has a wealth of ideas for coping with an excess of those little darlings, and provided me with an easy, quick way to make a huge pile of summer squash into a delicious (and reasonably sized) dish that is a great meal in itself. We've been happily eating this all week, and have yet to tire of Oven Baked Squash with Cheese. Here's how to do it:
Preheat your oven to 450 degrees (this is important!)

-Slice summer squash (zucchini, crookneck and/or scalloped) into 1/2 inch thick slices

-Spread in one layer in a large roasting pan and toss to coat with olive oil

(they will shrink a lot, so you can crowd them in there)

-Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste

-Bake for 20-25 min. -do not turn or stir- until flesh is very fork tender and tops are beginning to brown and carmelize.

-Remove from oven and immediately top with chopped fresh basil and freshly grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese.

Serve with crusty bread to soak up juices. YUM

Sizzling in Seattle - by Sue Shecket, webmaster and NW trial gardener

Mother Nature is having a lot of fun playing tricks on Northwest gardeners this year. After sharing in the cold temps and snow of Alaska all winter, we’ve now seemingly traded climate with our friends in the Northeast.

With no real rain since mid-May, and now suffering through a record breaking 100 degree heat wave, my salad greens are just a memory and the "Sungold" tomatoes and "Asian Trio"eggplant are growing like they are on steroids.

In the spirit of recycling, I found a use for this old Renee’s Garden seed rack frame, which has a new life as jailer for my rampaging tomatoes.

On the bright side, we’ve also traded our usual attire of fleece for cool surfer shorts, and are experiencing the pleasures of sitting outside on warm summer evenings while mastering the art of grilling all that summer squash along with our great NW salmon.

Once again I am kicking myself for not getting around to installing that drip irrigation system for my veggie beds, as it’s been a real challenge to keep things alive and hydrated.

Here's the view from my back deck - it's a very long climb down and up from garden to kitchen, so I get lots of additional exercise points just getting there and back multiple times daily.


I’ve been enjoying experimenting with color combos in the containers on my east facing deck. Here’s a shot of some of my favorites from seed - “Stained Glass” Salpiglossis, “Chantilly” Snapdragons and “Blue Ensign” Morning Glories.

I’m also a big fan of these tuberous begonias that especially enjoy my filtered morning sun and afternoon shade.











My neighbors always expect something spectacular to bloom in my front garden, so this year I went for lots of poppies - the French Flounce definitely got the most attention.


My garden also benefits greatly from the post-meal contributions of our 2 horses. Here's my boy Tazo, who is definitely the Cute One in our equine family.

As soon as our “normal” weather returns, I’ll be doing my fall planting of greens, lettuce, etc. I’ve already got a good stand of "Lacinato" Kale, "Bright Lights" Chard and "Jewel-Toned" Beets, which will be long term garden residents through the fall and winter.

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

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.

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.