Idaho gardeners have harvested a treasure trove of delicious and healthy products from their gardens. We’re shouting out some of them for their successes.
BOISE, Idaho – With this summer’s intense heat, severe drought, and relentless smoke, landscaping has been a challenge for some of us. But as summer draws to a close, Idaho gardeners are reaping a treasure trove of delicious and healthy produce from their gardens.
So, let’s say hello to them and show us all some of their gardening achievements. Because even in the toughest years, you can let it grow.
Tomatoes top the list as the most popular plant in the vegetable garden, but many gardeners in Idaho have commented on how sparse their tomato harvest was this summer and how slowly they ripened.
Even so, Jacque McVey was able to harvest an abundance of juicy, red tomatoes from her garden. And Christen Fisher had a bumper crop of sweet cherry tomatoes. Mary Jones has harvested a number of hybrid and heirloom tomatoes.
Cucumbers rank second among the popular local vegetables. Dan Waring has a batch ready to be made into cucumbers while Lizabeth Corson picked some curvy Armenian cucumbers. Shari Kuzman had quite a few cukes of her own.
Shari also picked a piece of paprika. We’re not sure she’ll put them in. And Mary Jones filled a basket with fresh chillies and peppers from her garden. She also had a lot of crookneck squash, another very popular vegetable with gardeners in Idaho.
Many of our fellow gardeners have harvested an assortment of fresh produce, like this bounty that covers the Leota Hill kitchen counter. Eve Powers shows her a cornucopia of fresh beans, peas, pumpkin, cucumber, tomatoes and even fresh herbs. Leann Day’s kitchen counter looks like a farmers market with its assortment of freshly picked vegetables. And that variety of tomatoes and cucumbers as well as a watermelon, eggplant and a bowl of delicious purple beans came from Linda Johnston’s garden.
And it looks like Gina Stafford is preparing to make loads of pickles and salsa with her harvest.
Speaking of salsa, Jacque McVey has a portion ready for her next fiesta. Idaho gardeners are experts at preserving and preserving a variety of their gardening treasures, including herbs like this jar of parsley dried in eve Powers. Karen Clifford sliced a bunch of fresh cherry tomatoes and dried them in the sun. And Melanie Lunney sliced a huge amount of jalapeno peppers for drying.
Idaho is also famous for its wide variety of delicious fruits. Zaheen Tariq is about to harvest some delicious peaches, plums, pears and grapes.
Not everything we grow is for food. Kyle Stoffle grows pumpkins. There are all kinds of interesting and colorful varieties that are often used in works of art.
Sometimes Mother Nature just likes to see how big and how she can make things grow, like this huge and unusually shaped mushroom cup tomato from Marcela Laird’s garden. And take a look at this giant cabbage and cauliflower that Scott and Colleen Frisbie grew in their cabin near Lowman. It looks like the warm summer days are good for mountain gardens.
Occasionally we get weird looking vegetables too. Like that giant eggplant with pointed arms that Shauna Miller grew. Or that weird-looking tomato Renlynne Pierce picked in her yard. It looks like Olaf from ‘Frozen’. And Connie Yunger shared this picture of some oddly shaped carrots she dug up. Her husband calls them ‘Laurel and Hardy’.
It’s not uncommon for tomato plants to get quite large. Traci Liew is standing next to one of her almost two meters high. But it’s hard to beat Clay Friend’s tomato wall. They are two and a half meters tall and are still growing. He uses fence pipes and cross sticks to hold them up. Many of our tomatoes may have been slow this year, but clay hasn’t slowed down. At 93, he is still working in the garden.
After all, this picture of Michelle Hought’s son enjoying a juicy, home-grown, ripe melon shows the whole reason so many of us love gardening – the satisfaction of developing a green thumb and making your own fresh-tasting, healthy food to harvest. And as always, you can let it grow.
You can join the nearly 9,000 members of the KTVB You Can Grow It Facebook to show us some of your gardening successes.
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