Tomato Plants - To Prune Or Not To Prune
Posted: 6/1/2009 1:14 AM
Although many gardeners say it's not necessary, I like to prune my tomato plants. The one growing in the back left corner of my Oasis Garden is a Roma, which I've never grown before. It was so bushy you could hardly see the tomatoes growing on the vines. So, I cut off some of the sucker branches-the ones that have no flowers on them. Now, you can see there are lots of green tomatoes. It's been cool here again (in the low 60s). I think they're waiting for some warmer weather before ripening.
I pulled out the snow peas, leaving a big empty space along the trellis. Hopefully, the cucumber plant in the back right corner will soon latch onto the trellis and fill the void.
The first bell peppers are coming! Although it's a red bell pepper plant, they start off green. We'll be cooking lots of Mexican food once they're ripe.
Look how the Swiss chard has grown. Pretty soon I can begin harvesting it. 
Swiss chard is a vegetable that I never tried until I grew it myself. I find that when's it's cooked, it tastes a lot like spinach. In fact, I'll often substitute it for spinach in recipes. For instance, Swiss chard lasagna is delicious--just as tasty as spinach lasagna. Plus, unlike spinach, you can grow it in the summer here, no matter how hot it gets.
At long last, I snipped some of the basil and made our first batch this year of Garden Pesto (www.epicurious.com). I served it on pasta and it was fabulous! I made a whole bunch, and put the leftover pesto in the freezer. I also made Lemon-Garlic Green Beans (www.allrecipes.com), a very simple and tasty dish. I forgot to mention previously, when you cook the burgundy beans, they change in color from purple to green. How cool is that? Another favorite recipe of the past week was Arugula Salad with Shaved Parmesan and Balsamic Vinaigrette (www.foodnetwork.com). Even though I picked and refrigerated the last of the arugula over two weeks ago, it was still perfectly fresh. It's amazing how long vegetables will stay fresh when they don't have to spend time on a truck, in a packaging plant and then on a store shelf. Plus, home-grown vegetables taste so much better than the store-bought stuff!