High as the sky

I was so excited about getting home to see the garden. So much has grown or germinated in the last week. It was amazing. One of the varieties of tomatoes is now 33 inches tall after 5 weeks in the Grow Box container. Now that is really impressive.

When I told my second daughter, Kimmie, how tall the plants were she responded "that you always told me that tomatoes could grow as high as heaven." Some tomatoes would grow to heaven if allowed to do what they wanted to. My purple Cherokees certainly believe that they can reach heaven and are working hard to get that high.

We also now have beans, cucumbers, and okra starting to grow. The only disappointment was the zucchini I chose for the summer, but that is why you deal with the best seed houses. A quick call to Burpee (a company I have used for years because they do not treat their seeds with pesticide) and a new packet of seeds are on their way. You can not depend on seedlings to grow all of your crops and I have dealt with a lot of companies over the years.

If you have a particular company that works with the extension services, like Parks Seeds in Greenwood, SC, you can get seeds some years that never have been seen beyond testing. One example was the year that sugar snap peas first came on the scene. That plant was a collaboration between Parks and the South Carolina extension service. Sugars are a hybrid between English peas and a Japanese pea pod.

That first year, the seeds were as scarce as hen's teeth, and the people who ordered a $25.00 order from Parks were given 30 seeds of Sugar Snap Peas. Now in the mid 70's $25.00 was a big order and worth every dime. I planted the sugar snap pea seeds in early February and by April my neighbor and I ate every sugar snap that grew on those vines.

The beauty of organic is we do not like pesticides and the peas were untouched by poison. We would chat and eat on both sides of the fence. I don't believe a pea made it into the house that year. Maybe not the next year either.