Dear Friends and Fellow Gardeners,

I had to chuckle when I read in the July Connections that someone suggested Dan and Barbara use the picket stakes to support growing heirloom tomatoes.

My dear wife Barbara has a serious malady called heirloomis tomatoitus. She has planted every nook and cranny with such wild tomato wonders as Amish paste, homestead, orange banana, persimmon, black plum, red calabash, long tom, white wonder, tyboroski, and soldacki. This doesn’t count the hundreds of volunteers of who-knows-what that spring up everywhere. Barbara is very protective, so at dusk I secretly sneak some of the volunteers into the compost pile.

Barbara has also gone bonkers with sunflowers this year. When I wasn’t looking, she was planting them in my Japanese garden. Bad, bad, bad. At first I was perturbed because I hadn’t finished planting the garden and warned her that if they got in the way I would have to pull them out. Somehow they have prospered into a giant sunflower forest to the delight of everyone who visits. Some of the varieties are unique and include giant sun gold, Italian white, Russian mammoth (old favorite) some large flowered mix’s and my two favorites, teddy bear, and velvet queen. A lady visiting a neighbor last week asked if she might have a few blooms —we were glad to share. The following day we were presented with a huge plate of cookies followed by a thank you card. Wow! I think next year I will plant sunflowers.

Everything in the garden has gotten super size this year; tomatoes are huge, the corn is every bit of 10 ft+, the beets and carrots are fat and sweet, and the gourds, if we allowed them, would smother everything within sight and reach. It is incredible how fast they can curl their tendrils around anything close. I leaned up a shovel 2 ft. away and by the next day a green wiry tendril had a firm grip wrapped around the handle.

Another plant that is especially big this year is the amaranthus, with red magenta stalks to 8 ft. The Bloomingdale spinach was doing great until the heat hit, then it bolted. (chickens had a feast) What to do with all of the zucchini — help! Indira, I need some recipes! This was also a great year for the Stockton red onions, I harvested them last month and will enjoy their sweet flavor for some months to come.

Remember my experiment with the corn gluten ‘Supressa’ for controlling crabgrass in my lawn? It really worked! Within two weeks of the application the 7 percent nitrogen gave the grass a green boost of growth, and to date I have found only three spots of crabgrass, for about a 90% control. This appears to be a real organic alternative for weed seed control in lawns and perennial planter beds.

We hope you are enjoying and having as much fun as we are in our garden.