A Photographic Tour of Our Farm and Gardens.

Author and photographer Laura Phillips stopped by and took many of these photographs.

In a few weeks these young chicks and their mother will be patrolling the garden, snapping up ticks and other tasty morsels, and leaving behind a great organic fertilizer!



Here I am near my nursery in Late April of 2009, with a Demidov tomato plant. Many thanks to Tatiana of Tatiana's Tomatobase for highlighting this great tomato.


Here is another Demidov Plant in late April of 2009.  This plant was started on February 1, and the fruit was ripening by the end of May. This one is growing in a 5-gallon container--the plant topped out at about 3 1/2 feet.


Here's a Creole tomato that we grew for the first time this year. This is a fabulous, small slicing tomato for hot, humid climates.  Our 2009 summer was actually rainy and cool, but the Creoles still produced well, and the plants had relatively few problems with the damp, rainy weather. 

You can see from the leaf blight that this Borgo Cellano plant had some trouble with the damp summer. And the fruit cracks pretty badly during wet weather, too. Not only that but the fruit is good, but nothing like that of great tasting tomotoes like the Creole or Mortgage Lifter that we grow.

I grow the Borgo Cellano every year for three reasons.  (1), I got the seeds for this variety from the late Chuck Wyatt, and it's the only variety I grow that is directly decending from his seeds.  (2), the Borgo Cellano is my best producer in hot, dry years.  A few years back we had six weeks with 95-105 degree F temperatures, with no rain (in July and August).  With steady watering the Borgo plants happily produced a ton of fruit, with no cracking. And (3), the maturity of these semi-determinate plants is quite early, with the first fruits ripening at about 70 days.

You noticed the chicken wire? Our poultry are free to wander through the garden.  They eat a very large number of bugs.  Visitors to our garden comment on the absence of ticks after a tour. But the birds LOVE tomatoes.  So each bed or plant gets surrounded by poultry netting.



The Melrose Pepper is a small, intensely sweet Italian frying pepper.  It's name comes from the Chicago area suburb, Melrose Park, where Italian Americans have been growing, eating, and celebrating with the Melrose Pepper for several generations.

The Melrose Pepper plants are quite productive--I've counted over a dozen fruit on the plants at a time.  The first red fruit are often available in about 70 days.  In a most years, the plants will put out a second crop in late autumn, though usually with fewer fruit.

The plants also do very well in a 5-gallon container.




These are ready-to-pick Blizzard Snow Peas.  They're quite tasty, and it's hard to resist eating the ones that are meant for seed.

The Blizzard was a commercial variety that was dropped by one of the big seed companies.  Fedco Seeds, of Maine, grew out the plants and saved the seeds for over ten years, until the plant patent expired, and that's why the variety is now available again to gardeners. It has produced very well for us for two years during its spring growing season. 



The Gilfeather Turnip is really a rutabaga.  Rutabagas just can't get any respect! But by any name, this is a great plant.

The Gilfeather has at least two claims to fame.  It's on the Slow Food USA's 'Ark of Taste', a list of heritage foods that the group feels are worthy of saving from oblivion in a fast-food world.  And the town of Wardsboro, Vermont, where the Gilfeather was bred, has an annual festival to celebrate the town's not-quite-famous root vegetable.

Our farm is a long way from Vermont (we're in southwestern Missouri), but we've found the Gilfeather to be a valuable addition to the garden.  Planted in early August here, the Gilfeathers form large roots by mid-November.  The plants over-winter here with little or no frost/freeze protection, and then go on the next spring to produce numerous beautiful yellow flowers, and then seed pods. It's leaves are excellent to eat as a stir-fry, especially after a frost in the fall and spring.  They are very nutritious, and are well loved by both our goats and chickens, as well.



This is a rare butternut squash that we hope to have seed for sale in 2011.  The plant were healthy, productive, and the first fruits ripened for us in about 95 days.  The fruit is very fine-fleshed, and has a good taste, too.  The size of the squash range from 3 to 8 pounds.  (Those are raspberry leaves, vines and thorns in the photo--not evidence of some strange mutation.)



These are Doc's Strawberry plants, named by a kind neighbor of Doctor Edward Drace of Keytesville, Missouri, a dentist who loved plant breeding.  Paul Jensen let me come by his northern Missouri home a couple of years ago, and dig up a few plants that his parents had gotten when they lived next door to the doctor.

The Doc's Strawberry plants are very healthy, and make it through our winters with few problems.  The berries are large, and lucious. Friends and family who have tasted them all say they are excellent, and wish I would hurry up and propagate some more plants so that I can share them.  Each plant puts out four or five runners a year, so we hope to be able to share them in a few more years.