We have plants and produce for sale this week. Our dates, times and location are Wednesday and Friday from 3 to 6 at Hattie’s Garden; and Saturday from 8 to 12 at the Historic Lewes Farmers Market (HLFM).

The Garden

The weather will give us another round of cooler air and a substantial amount of rainfall early this week. That is good news for farmers and gardeners on Delmarva. We are preparing our planting beds ahead of time as quickly as we can so that we can take advantage of the wet ground and cooler temperatures to establish more of our wonderful healthy plants.

In our garden, we will be planting tomatoes, flowers, peppers and eggplants later this week, and you can too.

This will be a perfect time for any of you who want to do a garden, but haven’t been able to start or those of you with a bit more space who enjoy succession planting so everything is not all ready at one time!

There is still plenty of time to plant tomatoes and any other warm weather vegetables, flowers and herbs that you would like to install successfully.

New Plants

Hattie’s Garden will have a new and final batch of at least 20 tomato varieties ready for you this week, and there are plenty of nice healthy bell peppers of every color, other sweet peppers, and hot peppers including habenero! All kinds are waiting to go into the ground. Our eggplant plants are on sale as well and include both Asian and Italian eggplant styles.

Grafted Heirloom Tomatoes

We have a couple of trays of grafted tomato plants this year from Johnny’s Selected Seeds that consists of the tasty & productive German Johnson, the wonderfully delicious Cherokee Purple and the sweet, juicy German Striped.

We had terrific luck with our grafted tomato plants last summer and can’t wait to see how these do for us. The small plants did not arrive to us until mid-May, and we have been carefully growing them out since then.

We do not have enough room to grow them all in our garden, and are offering a few of them for sale this week to our customers. They are significantly more expensive than other tomato plants, and will need a bit more tending, but the harvest should be more than worth it for those of you who would like to be adventurous.

Herbs

We continue to have a full line of herbs, including a new offering for us known as Mexican Coriander or Culantro. This unusual looking plant is used as a warm-weather substitute for the cool-weather loving cilantro. Strangely enough, this tropical, warm weather plant still wants some relief from the direct sun. It is best to provide afternoon shade if you can and it should grow for you in some of your more shady spots also. Keep it moist, but NOT wet. Remove the flowers so it will provide you with leaves to use.

This Week’s Feature: Cutting Zinnias

Our second batch of Benary Giant Zinnias (4-5″ flower and 4-5 foot plant) is ready for planting and is joined by State Fair Zinnias (4″ flower, 3-4 foot plant), Oklahoma Zinnias (2″ flower and 3 foot plant) and Cut and Come Again Zinnias (2-3″ blooms and 2 foot plant).

The Benary Giant Zinnias come in separate colors or mixes and the others are all mixed colors. Remember these are cutting zinnias and while they will continue to bloom all summer, the more you cut them, the better they will grow and bloom.

The hybrids, Benary Giant and Oklahoma, are simply beautiful and generally have more disease resistance and more uniformity in flowering, but if you wish to save seeds, grow the open-pollinated varieties such as the State Fair and Cut & Come Again — both of which have a very large following.

Allow some late flowers to remain on the plant until the heads go to seed and dry out, remove the heads and shake and rub out the seeds. Always keep seeds from the best flowers.

Plant your zinnias about 9″ apart. They will fill in and are all sturdy and should not need to be staked, but the tallest will benefit from staking or planting in a protected area, such as near a foundation wall.

All zinnias need and like plenty of sun and fertility. Some fertilizers will have too much nitrogen and you might get more green than flower, so we suggest you use an organic fertilizer specifically for flowers and plant in rich soil.

Espoma Flower Tone is the best organic flower fertilizer for the home gardener that I have ever used. A full line of Espoma is available locally at East Coast Perennial or online at Amazon.

Other Flowers

A new planting of all of our Marigolds is ready as well as small amounts of most of our other flowers. If you are interested in our Gomphrena, our Tall Ageratum, Salvia, or even Coreposis, please email Hattie directly, so she can save some of this for you before putting it into our cutting beds.

Produce

When you come, don’t forget to grab a bag of arugula, or a bunch of Hakurei turnips, or other fresh produce.

Our produce is available in the garage and kept cold and fresh for you.

And as always, we will have many plants and lots of produce available for you at the HLFM every Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon!

See you shortly.

Yours in the garden, planting, weeding, harvesting and enjoying the nice long days,