I’m a gardening and culinary professional with a degree from the Robert Reynolds Chef Studio. My husband, Larry, and I co-own Verdura Culinary Gardens. We design, install, and maintain raised-bed organic vegetable gardens for Portland-area residents who love to cook and would like to work with fresher, more seasonal ingredients.
chocolate, great crusty bread, garlic, almost anything with tomatoes, lamb, red wine
Marcella Hazan, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver
urban farmer, chef, cooking teacher, passionate foodie, oenophile
Yes, absolutely. We aren’t watering them at all at this point in the season.
| Fall gardening |
Ugh, late blight definitely can be an issue. We usually rip out plants when we realize we have it, as there’s no way to stop it and it spreads to other, healthy plants. Worse, the longer you leave plants in place, the more likely you are to have it next year. So I would pull off the healthy green tomatoes and get those plants out of there. Do NOT put them in your compost - they’ll have to go in the trash. Green tomatoes will ripen on your kitchen counter but they’ll never have as much flavor as vine-ripened tomatoes. Try chutneys or pickles, as suggested above, or slow-roast counter-ripened tomatoes with olive oil, garlic and herbs to concentrate their flavors.
| Tomato tips |
| Swiss chard |
Honestly, I’ve never seen them in any of our gardens. We garden in raised beds and keep them meticulously clean, doing a major end-of-season cleanup. I read that the adult weevils over-winter in plant debris in the soil, so that could be an issue for some people. Our biggest issue with peas is this very cold, wet weather this year as well as last year. The sugar snaps have so much sugar in them, the seeds tend to rot before they germinate!
I’m sorry, but we don’t have pea weevils here, so I can’t be of much help with that one.
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