The Morning Glories just keep on growing and growing! They have become a big hit with our flower-loving customers, but good news, we still have a good amount for you to choose from. Plus, many are blooming right in their pots!   

As for the other flowers, we have 6" decorative pots of beautiful pink Begonias, Mexican Sunflowers, Balsam Impatiens, Apple Blossom Cleome, and more.

A little about Morning Glories:

The latin name is Ipomea, which is derived from two Greek words that mean "resembling" and "worm" or "bindweed." The name, of course, refers to their twining habit. But not all Morning Glories are vines. Ipomea is a collective name for annual and perennial vines, shrubs, and even trees. The sweet potato plant (Ipomea batatas), which is another crop we grow, is part of this large family. Sweet potatoes actually have just as pretty blossoms as the common morning glory.

Morning Glories love full sun, but do well in part shade. They need some sort of structure to climb on such as a trellis, fence, deck railings, lamp post, birdbath, and the list goes on. They can be trained to grow over other flowers, shrubs, and trees - we especially like to have them grow up the finished blooming lilacs and forsythias that are so common around here. Morning Glories do well planted directly in the ground, but they can be grown from containers, too.        

Morning Glories come in all different colors: heavenly blue, milky white, scarlet red, royal purples, pretty pinks, tricolors, and even some with variegated foliage.         

Morning Glories will start blooming a few weeks after they begin vining out and then they will continue to bloom until frost. If you're lucky, your vine may have set seed. If so, next year you just might have another Morning Glory growing in its place!

Hello,

This week we start picking strawberries.  It looks like we have a rather small crop this year for a variety of reasons.  While the berries are relatively small, they are really flavorful!  Our snow peas will start on Wednesday and sugar snap peas on Friday.  We should have a good supply of both types of peas this year.  Last Saturday we started picking our garlic scapes.  Garlic scapes are a special treat and have an absolutely delicious flavor.  After cooking they remind one of a young snap bean with a slight garlic flavor.  They are used in a number of recipes.  This year we started some of our zucchini plants in our greenhouse and covered them with a row cover in the field.  They are doing great and blooming heavily.  However, there are still few male blooms so the female flowers aren't setting zucchini just yet.  Hopefully we will have a few zucchini by Saturday and a really good supply next week.

Me thinks we will start picking our green beans around July 1.  The first planting is big and doing fabulously.  We have already made several other plantings including a yellow bean patch-more plantings are in the plans.

My son Matthew's Sweet Corn Planner's Window's software, which he first developed in 2009, is forecasting right now that our first patch of sweet corn will start on July 15 assuming average weather from now until then.  Since average weather seldom is normal, we will update this date in every newsletter-stay tuned! 

Since our Mirai sweet corn was such a big hit the last two years with our customers we have more than doubled the size of the planting and of the number of patches.  We now hope to have Mirai corn available from about August 1 to October 1.  Mirai is great tasting corn.  It not only is exceptionally sweet it is tender and flavorful.  The only objection we have had so far is that a few people think it might be a tad overly sweet. If you find this to be a problem, hold it for a couple of days after you buy before you eat it. Because Mirai corn is so tender, you can't find true Mirai corn in supermarkets since most supermarket corn is not only mechanically harvested it is handled quite roughly in shipment-the tender kernel Mirai just can't take this!   

We only grow bi-color Mirai corn this year although Mirai is available in white and yellow versions.  While we are big into Mirai this year we have planted regular sweet corn too.  In fact, during July we will only have regular corn since there are no extra-early Mirai varieties and Mirai requires very warm soil to germinate.  One variety of our regular corn is Bon Appetit. This variety produces a big, fat ear and has a taste I personally love.  Perhaps this might be my favorite corn.  We have five different patches of Bon Appetit and we hope to start picking it around July 20-25.  While we are growing some all white corn this year, we have given up on all yellow because of lack of demand. This is a bit sad since we know there are some of you out there that prefer all yellow corn.  Sorry about that!

The next issue (July/August) issue of Grit magazine is supposed to have my article on pawpaws which they re-titled from Pawpaw Adventures to The Lure of Michigan Bananas. Grit magazine is available at Tractor Supply, Family Farm and Home and several other stores I the area.  Also Fremont Library has copies and in a month or so I may have some copies available at the market. 

In keeping with my article, our pawpaw crop looks huge this year. My oldest son and I have become very fond of the custardy flesh that has the flavors of vanilla, banana, pineapple and some say mango all in one.  It definitely tastes tropical, which is logical since it is the only member of the tropical custard-apple family that is native to Michigan.  I bet there are lots of papaws around Pawpaw Lake and the town of Pawpaw down by St. Joe, although one of my in-laws had a cottage on Pawpaw Lake and I don't remember them mentioning the fruit or tree. If you think you may be interested in purchasing pawpaw trees from us next spring let me know since I am thinking of possibly selling some since I now have hundreds (maybe more) that I can make available for sale next spring. One other thing: The article that is published in Grit is my second version-though the editor there liked my original article, he wanted me to change it a bit and especially to shorten it.  If you are interested, I can have copies of the original down at the market to give away. No photos though!  You have to buy Grit for that! I won't put the original over the internet since I don't want to get in trouble with Grit.  They have been very helpful to me.

We still have some nice large Mt. Spring and Mt. Pride tomato pants left in good sized pots.  If you have a sunny spot you might want to put a few tomato plants in.  We have grown both varieties and find them very crack resistant so you can let them ripen right on the vine and they will only crack after a rain when they are really, really ripe.  Even though its getting a tad late for tomatoes, if you have a sunny spot both types should get you some nice big, juicy tomatoes, although Mt. Spring is about a week later than Mt. Pride.