I never have much great luck with bush beans in my raised beds, and I pulled them out tonight. We did fine from them, but they are done. A few tomatoes aren't great: I purchased them from the same source. I could have overwatered them, or it could be that particular bed, or they could just have come with problems....I just prune off yellow foliage and let them keep on because they are loaded with fruit. Okra has been weird this year with me too. They just SAT and did nothing for weeks until I gave them some cottonseed meal. Other forms of nitrogen seemed to do nothing for them, but that worked fine. Next year I'll try manure in the planting hole. Seems they enjoy a stronger dose of fertilizer at a younge age! My squash and watermelon are SLOW but that's OK. Planted late, and they are in a very weedy area and competing with the mullien I planted. I am sure they will do just fine and eventually produce well. I am also going to plant more melon, I like to plant them in stages. Actually as soon as this godawful heat passes I have more tomatoes, sweet potatoes and melons to put in the ground! My limas are going everywhere. The package said bush. THEY ARE NOT BUSH, lol. Ah, well, as long as they make limas I'm good. The bush and climbing beans are doing well. I pulled out one summer squash and planted two hot peppers in it's place. Three more summer squash are meh. Not giving me much, totally full of borers. I smartly underplanted these with more eggplant, which are now flowering and beginning to produce. I've had herbs out the wazoo. This was the first year for blueberry harvest off of dwarf plants. They were trial plants, and haven't done much but were good this year. They are planted in a bed of strawberries which was OK. Not as many berries as last year. I need to add more "good stuff" to their bed and replant them in the fall. Sweet peppers are beginning to fruit. I've had more cucumbers than I know what to do with from just 6 plants!!!! They went NUTS (and other other plants are just starting to produce!) and I now have a few dozen jars of pickles, have given away two bags, eat at least 3 every day (so does my DH). It's been wonderful. We still have chard and kale but tonight's kale was really cabbagey tasting so I guess it's time to pull it soon (it is shading some blueberries yet, so I hate to pull it until heat passes).

Well, 'Sally and Bob' is amazing, but then there's 'Clifford's Stingray', that is to die for, but "Oh!", can't forget 'Embroidery', what unusual form and there's my new 'Yakushima' (Yeah Teresa!!!!!!!) in the prized garden spot, and over in the side garden 'Warwick Ballerina' dances in the breeze, another, 'Candy Dish' takes my breath away in the front garden, and 'Marilyn Monroe' is so sweetly feminine in the back garden, and 'Fort Knox' glows like the gold in its namesake (is there still gold at Fort Knox??). Sigh, pick one, I guess it depends on which part of the yard I'm on. LOL! Oh, and I can't forget 'Warwick Comet' and 'Guardian Angel', sigh. Donna

It has been an odd spring... weather has been part of it, hot and sunny and then cool and wet. It has never settled down and felt like spring. It is actually raining! Second day in a row. In June! (For those of you not from Northern California... it is weird, an occasional shower after early May, is very rare, but to be socked in with a constant drizzling rain this late in the year is freakish). I had to cover all the Lithops and other Mesemb's (or Aizoaceae now days...) that were out for the summer. Two days of cool rain this time of year and they would all either swell up and burst, or just turn to mush. If they weren't so popular I wouldn't bother growing them.... I have seen waves of interested "just looking" browsers with actual buyers being rarer than expected. However due to increased traffic, Sales have been near plan, so I am doing OK. I just wish sales per customer would go up. However the last few weeks I have seen returning browsers that are now starting to buy, so maybe things are just running late this year due to the odd weather. Another oddity this month is my June Sale "draw" plants are not moving any faster than before they got marked down, so that experiment has not proven useful, at least yet. Being a Cacti, Succulent and Xeriscape plant nursery my sales peak in September and October, when everyone is tired of wasting water to try and keep their yards green.... But last weekend was my best ever, so I am not complaining. Most of the time I think retail is just too prone to chance to really know what is going through customers minds, regardless of all the data I track. I mean did having Berkeley's Open Artist Studios last weekend really help drive my business? (I am in the "Artist's Loft neighborhood") Yes, I saw more people coming through, about thirty percent more that the previous weekend. But that thirty percent was not buying. Actual sales per customer were down for both days, but like I said it was the best weekend I have ever had. So maybe it did help, but the big sales that drove the day were repeat customers that were coming back and opening up their wallets. Or in this case pulling out plastic. All my sales last weekend except one, was creditcards. Usually it is fifty-fifty.

My plants are quite behind but I too am looking forward to Mountain Magic F1. As well as the other two new ones that Randy sent me. But I think it would only fair to note, as he wrote at another message site, that Mountain Magic won't be available until 2010. Dr Randy Gardner wrote elsewhere: (I recently released from NC State Univ. a new indeterminate tomato hybrid named 'Mountain Magic'. This hybrid, resulting from the cross of a large fruited tomato with early blight and late blight resistance to a high sugar grape tomato line with early blight resistance, produces highly flavored round fruit that are 1.5- 2 oz. in size. The hybrid was released to the Dutch seed company Bejo and should be available beginning in 2010 in both conventional and organic seed. It should be listed in several seed catalogs. This hybrid will provide commercial growers and home gardeners with a superbly flavored, highly productive tomato with combined resistance to early blight and late blight.) Dr. Gardner, now retired as of last June but still actively breeding tomatoes, is known world wide for his work with tomatoes. Mulio got his MS degree with Dr. Gardener a few years back, and is still very much in touch with him. My contact with him goes back quite a few years re his work with Early Blight ( A. solani) resistance and use of heirlooms in breeding and once again he wants to incorporate heirloom tomatoes into his breeding program and this past Spring, as we'd agreed on last year, I sent him about maybe 20 - 30 varieties. In return he sent me seeds for Mountain Magic F1, Plum Regal F1, which he says has Late Blight resistance and Smarty F1. And Smarty F1, a grape tomato similar to Camapari but adapted to field culture is offered by Johnny's Selected Seeds this year. One of them, I think maybe the Plum Regal F1 has a longer DTM, I can't remember without reading the letter that came with the seeds, and he hoped I could mature it but only time will tell in this so far cold and rainy season. And there's always next year. Sigh. Keith, those fruits look great and I really hope that mine look as good here in LB territory and that I can mature them and the other two without problems. Please let us know what you think about the taste when they ripen. Many of you I'm sure know Dr. Gardner particularly for his Mountain series, such Mountain Spring, Mountain Glory, Mountain Fresh and several other Mt's as well as many other varieties. He's a wonderful man, he really is, and is now doing a lot of his breeding work back on the old family place in VA. But he usually worked at Fletcher, NC, which isn't that far from where my brother moved to when he moved from here to NC and if only I could get Dr. Gardner to Dx the diseases my brother has on his tomatoes. ( smile) For those who might be interested in Mountain Magic F1 and the backgrounds of the other two I mentioned above, I've linked to a site below. Carolyn. who shared seeds with only three folks; the person who raises my plants for me,obviously, the person who does almost all of my seed production even though no seeds will be saved from the F1's, and the person in IN who did the initial NAR X Brandywine cross. ( smile) Here is a link that might be useful: Dr. G's latest varieties