Vegetable Series - Tomato plant pruning

Hi. This is Kirsten Segler from The Greenery. We just want to talk to you a little bit about some harvesting. We're going to do a bit of harvesting in our vegetable garden here. Now broccoli, we've just finished picking the full crop about five days ago. So it's July 10th and this was a late crop so we planted this roughly sort of at the end of May and we harvested roughly July 10th. Now from the earlier newsletter you would have probably noticed we were picking brocolli a lot earlier than that. That's from our other garden on the property here. That was an early planting of brocolli. So that's one way of doing it, sort of stagger your plantings of cold crops especially brocolli because when it develops they're kind of all there at once. So do an early planting, you get your early crop and be totally bug free because this is a little cool for the bugs to get going. We're going to move along here. Just harvest a few things, get ready for a nice dinner, just show you a few things that are already in the garden. First one here is a new beet. This one we sold this year, it was... common name is the Candy Stripe Beet. We're going to pick one of those. Now these are probably a little bit bigger than you may want to have them but still already...there it is, nice, big size on that. And this is that beet that has kind of the peppermint candy look, white and red stripes inside. So pick one of those and then we're going to move along to the carrot patch here. Okay this is our carrot and kind of a regular beet bin. Now this was direct seeded so we simply just seed right in the garden and they're very dense and full now. So this is the time of the year when you can start thinning out. Now some people thin out in the beginning stage when they're just little seedlings. Now they're ready to pull out all of the ones and space out the ones they want to leave. The way I like doing it though is just thin out as they were sort of developing and then later on in the season there's less and less. They here then, they're the ones that got more room and they're getting bigger and bigger. So what you at this time of year is you just kind of move around and look for the ones that got a thicker top to them and those ones are...look at that. You seed it probably in the middle of May, roughly end of May. And there we go. So we got some nice carrots. Potatoes. We like growing a lot of the smaller variety. One of our favorites is the Banana Potato because you can already start harvesting early in the season and go right through until the end...until heavy frost. So this time of the year they're going to be pretty small but you can cook them up the way they are just like that. You don't even have to peel them. So they do get, you know two, two and a half times larger by the time the end of season rolls around but they're already perfectly edible like this and you just roast them off like that. Last of all for tonight's harvest, we're going pick a head of romaine lettuce for our caesar salad. And there we go. There's our fresh from the garden harvest We did head of romaine lettuce carrots, a big beet and potatoes. And we hope everyone else is enjoying their early summer harvest as we are here at The Greenery.