Checking on My Gardens

August 15, 2017

As many of you may know from following me on my Instagram page @MarthaStewart48, I’m back in New York after a lovely stay at Skylands, my home in Maine. On Sunday, I traveled from Seal Harbor to QVC in Pennsylvania, where I promoted my newest book, “Slow Cooker”, and then back to my Bedford farm.

I returned to another wonderful bounty of fresh vegetables from my garden. We’re having such an excellent season - beautiful onions, cucumbers, eggplants, and delicious greens for my salads and green juice. We’ve also started to harvest many, many tomatoes - large, medium, and small - all so tender and juicy.

Enjoy these photos.

: After two weeks in Maine, I was eager to visit my gardens back at my Bedford farm. Here is a drone’s view of my vegetable garden. The chicken coops are on the left, and my pumpkin patch is in the back.

: All the vegetables are doing great – I’ve enjoyed so many of them with my family and friends.

: Our leafy brassicas are still thriving – look at these beautiful savoy cabbages.

: Swiss chard is a another leafy green vegetable often used in Mediterranean cooking. The leaf stalks are large and vary in color, from this yellow, to white to deep pink and red.

: And there’s lots and lots of delicious kale. A kale plant has green or purple leaves and the central leaves do not form a head.

: We’ve had so many onions this season – look at our crops, there are still so many more to pick.

: Ryan already planted more lettuce in this bed. Most lettuce varieties mature in 45 to 55 days, which means we can easily plant two or even three crops during the season. Looseleaf and butterhead leaves can be harvested at just about any time in their development, but heading varieties take a bit longer to mature. Romaine takes 75 to 85 days.

: Next door, the pumpkin patch is filled with long vines, and young autumn fruits. It is still too early to harvest, but everything looks so great!

: Underneath all the sprawling vines, there are lots of beautiful varieties of pumpkin, winter squash and ornamental gourds. It is time to harvest when the vines and leaves start to wither and die back – these need another six to eight weeks.

: And our tomatoes are thriving. We’ve started to harvest juicy tomatoes from our 118 plants.

: These tomatoes are “BHN-1021” – eight to 16-ounce bright-red slicing tomatoes that have good texture and high eating quality.

: “Grandeur” tomatoes are early, red oblate-shaped cluster tomatoes with five to seven fruits per bunch. They’re about six to nine-ounces each and are very meaty.

: This variety is called “Chef’s Choice Orange” – an attractive orange beefsteak. These tomatoes are eight to 11-ounce fruits, low in acid and with very good flavor and texture.

: These are “Jasper” tomatoes – small, round fruits that are crack resistant, borne on small trusses, with a sweet and rich flavor.

: And, this variety is called “Cherry Bomb” – uniform, vivid red fruits with the perfect cherry size – great for snacking.

: Here are some of the tomatoes Ryan just picked – fresh off the vine, and on to large trays on my kitchen counter.

: I always have trays of tomatoes in the kitchen during this time of year. I love to cook with them and eat them fresh.

: This lettuce was also just picked – so beautiful and so delicious.

: And here are several eggplants. I like to pick them when they’re smaller, when they are young and tender.

: Here are some cucumbers, Cucumis sativus. Cucumbers are grown mainly to be eaten fresh, and in India, you’ll often find sliced cucumbers being sold on the street on sunny afternoons. The flesh of cucumbers is rich in vitamins A and C, and folic acid.

: Remember all the garlic we recently harvested? Here are just a few, with their long stems cut off.

: And this is freshly cut spinach from my garden – I love to use spinach for my morning green juice.

: This New Zealand spinach is from the last crop in my vegetable greenhouse. It is not related to true spinach but the leaves taste similar to, and some think better than, spinach.

: Once all the New Zealand spinach was picked, Enma ran it through the juicer, so it could be saved in tubs and frozen for later use.

: We had so much of this spinach – I always try to save as much as possible. This spinach is an excellent source of vitamins A and C, calcium, magnesium and phosphorous.