Harvesting ideas at GardenComm and a veggie garden report

It’s been a week of harvesting ideas at GardenComm along with tomatoes and peppers from my late summer veggie garden. These might seem like disparate topics but read on. I promise to tie them together.

I just returned from GardenComm’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City, and I so enjoyed the conference this year. The educational sessions were enlightening. I met four new-to-me homestead bloggers. They do a lot more crafts and canning than I do. I admire them because I do not like to can in the heat of summer. I did it as a teen with my mom, and it was hot.

As my friend, Carol, of May Dreams Gardens said, “I always knew there were other parallel blogging universes, but I could never figure out how to meet the bloggers in them.” Now we have.

Kris Bordessa of Attainable Sustainable, Teri Page of Homestead Honey, Amy Stross of Tenth Acre Farm and Devon Young of Nitty Gritty Life gave a talk on “Engage Your Audience Across Multiple Platforms.” They were so good, and I learned a few things. For example, I think I need a virtual assistant, but that’s my problem, not yours.

The gardens of Salt Lake City and its surrounding towns and suburbs were so beautiful. I especially liked Red Butte Garden. If you’re in the area, don’t miss it. Oh! And, I enjoyed Ashton Gardens at Thanksgiving Point. Look for a blog post on it in the coming weeks. It reminded me of Butchart Gardens.

At the trade show, I discovered a bunch of new products to try. Look for those on our podcast, the Gardenangelists, in the next several weeks, and I’ll also work them into blog posts.

Carol Michel and I hosted the awards portion of the GardenComm Honors and Awards Dinner. We are again co-chairs of the Awards Committee this year. I would encourage you, GardenComm member or not, to tell garden communicators of all stripes to enter the awards. We will have a wonderful slate of judges for next year, and there are many different categories. You don’t need to be a GardenComm member to win either although if you ever went to one of the recent conferences, you’d want to join.

They get better and better.

Back home, I harvested more tomatoes and peppers yesterday. It’s been an excellent tomato year in my garden. Peppers have been producing like gangbusters too. Soon, I’ll do a post on which tomatoes performed the best, but in the meantime, here are the tomatoes I grew this year. Yesterday, I harvested ‘Habanada’ peppers and Red Torch tomatoes. The tomatoes look like the love child of a larger cherry tomato and flaming grape tomato. They are beautiful and have a complex flavor. Meanwhile, out on the vines are so many ‘Fire Fly’ sweet cherry tomatoes that I’ve given up harvesting them. I do eat a few off the vine every time I go out there. I also moved a tomato worm from ‘Red Torch’ over to ‘Fire Fly’ and said, “Eat away!”

It’s late in the season, and the hornworm can try its best to turn into a five-spotted hawkmoth. Three ‘Fire Fly’ plants produced more tomatoes than our family, neighbors, and employees could eat. ‘Red Torch’ is less prolific, but is more “tomatoey.” Both ‘Red Torch’ and ‘Fire Fly’ are All-America Selection winners and are highly disease resistant.

Yum, yum.

This week on the Gardenangelists’ podcast, Carol Michel of May Dreams Gardens and I discussed asters and how to grow garlic. I hope you’ll tune in to listen. If you don’t know how to subscribe to a podcast, just email or message me on Facebook or Instagram, and I’ll show you how. It’s super easy, and the nice thing about podcasts is you can listen while you do other things like walk on the treadmill or clean your kitchen.

That reminds me. My kitchen needs cleaning. Ciao!