It's berry-picking time here at my Bedford, New York farm and I have an abundance of these small summer fruits just waiting to be harvested.
I grow many berries - I love sharing them with family and friends, and freezing them for use all year long. Behind my main greenhouse are bushes of raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, and currants. All of them are delicious eaten raw at the peak of ripeness, but can also be used for making jams, jellies, and other desserts. Yesterday, I along with my housekeepers, picked several trays and boxes of wonderful raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, and pink champagne colored currants.
Enjoy these photos.
This is a great year for all my berries. And they are ready right on schedule. These fruits typically start ripening in late June into July.
I have several rows of raspberry bushes. Summer-bearing raspberry bushes produce one crop each season that lasts about one month.
One plant can produce several hundred berries in a season. Raspberries are vigorous growers and will produce runners that fill up a bed.
Once raspberries are picked, they stop ripening, so under-ripe berries that are harvested will never mature to the maximum sweetness. Only ripe raspberries will come right off the stem. The black raspberry plant is a high producing early variety whose upright growth makes it easy for picking.
Here, only one raspberry is ready; the rest need more time. The berries will ripen gradually throughout the summer, so it’s important to check the crop every few days.
This all-purpose fruit is firm, sweet, and full of flavor. It tastes great eaten fresh off the stem or made into preserves.
The raspberry is made up of small “drupe” fruits which are arranged in a circular fashion around a hollow central cavity. Each drupelet features a juicy pulp with a single seed.
The raspberry plant has spade-shaped leaves that are toothed along the edges. My bushes are several years old and remain so healthy. It takes about two to three years for a new raspberry plant to produce a significant crop of fruit.
But most raspberry plants also have small thorns, or prickles, along their stems and canes – they are part of the rose family.
My tip for freezing is to place a layer of berries onto a baking sheet and freeze them until they are solid, then transfer them into plastic bags or containers, so they store easily back in the freezer.
Here’s Enma picking a tray of black raspberries. I like to pick early in the morning before it gets too warm. There are more than 200-species of raspberries. In the United States, about 90-percent of all raspberries sold come from the states of Washington, California, and Oregon.
This is a tray of red raspberries. These must be picked and handled very carefully as they are very delicate. They should also be checked for insects – they love them.
This year, I also have blackberry bushes. This is one of the fruits. The blackberry is packed with vitamins C, K, and E, rich in dietary fiber, and low in sugar. Blackberries are juicy and delicious eaten raw. I can’t wait to pick more.
Some of the gooseberries are also ready. The gooseberries in my garden include ‘Pixwell’, ‘Invicta’, and ‘Hinnonmaki Red’.
Gooseberries are native to Europe, northwest Africa, and all regions of Asia except for the north. Gooseberries grow best in areas with cold, freezing winters and humid summers.
The color of gooseberries depends on the variety. It can range from red and purple to yellow and green.
Gooseberries are not difficult to pick, but the stems are thorny, so care must be taken when harvesting the fruits.
Here are some of the clustered currants. I grow white, red, pink, and black currant varieties. These ‘Pink Champagne’ currants are pendant clusters of fruits the color of champagne blushed with pink. These currants are less tart than the red and among the sweetest of all currants.
White currants are sweet and tart with floral undertones. Although the fruits are the primary source of food from the plant, the leaves, and tender, young shoots are also edible.
Currants are still largely unknown here in the United States. They are well-loved in many other countries, and here in the US, they are slowly gaining popularity, especially because of the high antioxidant content. They are now more prevalent at local farms and home gardens.
Look at these trays of fruit – so exciting, and not bad for a first harvest. And there will be many, many more…
This time of year, I always display lots of potted tropical plants around my Bedford, New York farm.
The Mexican Fan Palm is native to Mexico, but has naturalized in several states including Florida, California, Hawaii, and Texas. It's a beautiful palm tree with shiny, deep green fronds and a trunk that can reach up to 100 feet tall. I have several Mexican fan palms in my tropical plant collection. This year, I decided they would look great displayed around my pool where they can flourish in full sun.
Here are some photos, enjoy.
My pool was built to run north to south in this space, so I could enjoy all the gorgeous views of the landscape.
There were three fan palms that needed repotting into more suitable containers. Pete starts by running a hori hori knife around the inner edge of the pot to loosen the palm’s root ball.
Then slowly and carefully, Pete and Fernando remove the specimen from its vessel.
Mexican fan palms have large, three to five foot wide fronds that are palmate, meaning shaped like fans.
Here is the root ball once it is out of the pot. Fan palm trees, like other palm trees, have fibrous root systems that spread out horizontally.
Here’s another view of the root ball. Notice the base of the trunk of the palm. The Mexican fan palm, Washingtonia robusta, and California fan palm, Washingtonia filifera, come from the same family and look very similar. One main difference is the Mexican fan palms have much slimmer trunks that grow taller than its cousin.
Ryan places a broken pot shard into the pot to cover the drainage hole. It keeps dirt from falling through the hole while making sure there is still room for proper drainage.
The shard need not be large – just big enough to cover the hole. Save shards from broken pots to repurpose the pieces.
The planter is filled a third of the way with a good potting soil mix.
We use Scotts Miracle-Gro Cactus, Palm & Citrus Potting Mix, which is fast-draining and is designed for both indoor and outdoor container plants. The mix contains a blend of sand, perlite, and sphagnum peat moss, which helps prevent soil compaction, improve drainage, and retain water and nutrients.
Ryan trims and scarifies the root ball to stimulate growth and to ensure the roots can spread in the pot and absorb nutrients from the soil. Teasing roots apart before planting is a good practice for all plants.
Ryan places the fan palm in the container, making sure it is planted as deep as it was in its previous pot and about an inch under the rim of the new pot.
Here’s Ryan stopping for a quick photo as he tamps down lightly around the base of the palm to make sure there is good contact between the soil and the plant.
Pete wheels the specimen to its location on the other side of the pool.
Here’s Ryan removing another palm from its old pot. Notice he is working on a tarp. Doing this helps to contain all the plant debris and any dropping soil and saves a lot of time in cleaning up.
Again, Ryan fills about a third of the new pot with soil mix and then combines it with fertilizer.
The palm is placed into its new container and Pete adds more soil mix to just under the rim of the planter. This is also a good tip – filling to just under the rim will prevent soil from falling out when the plant is watered.
These Mexican fan palms prefer full sun to partial shade – they will do well here pool side until they are brought back into their designated hoop house in the fall.
I always arrange and display my potted plants differently eery year. This season, the fan palms join potted Agave bracteosa, or Squid Agaves, around my pool’s edge.
I also planted six Ginkgo biloba Goldspire™ Obelisk trees around the pool last month. These trees are doing excellently.
Everything is looking so lush and green.
This is one of the best spots at my farm during summer – I look forward to any time I can spend by the pool. We’re expecting another warm day here in the Northeast – stay safe, cool, and hydrated.
My large half-acre vegetable garden is so much fun to visit right now because of all the growing produce - there’s something new popping up every day.
This garden, which is now in its second growing season, is filled with so many wonderful crops - tomatoes, spinach, brassicas, beets, Swiss chard, sweet and hot peppers, onions, leeks, shallots, potatoes, artichokes, asparagus, all sorts of herbs, and more. I've already picked several vegetables, and every one has been delicious. Check out my Instagram page @marthastewart48. And, I always plant in succession, meaning I seed crops at intervals of seven to 21 days in order to maintain a consistent supply of harvestable produce throughout the summer.
Enjoy these photos.
This garden is looking so beautiful. And I planned this new garden close to my Winter House, so I can get to it quickly, see what is growing, and pick what is ready.
At the edge of all the beds, I planted herbs. Thyme is on the left. Thyme is an herb whose small leaves grow on clusters of thin stems. It is a Mediterranean herb with dietary, medicinal, and ornamental uses. It is delicious with fish or poultry and imparts a lemony flavor. On the right, tomatillos, also known as the Mexican husk tomato.
It’s easy to spot where the tomatoes are growing by all the bamboo supports. If you’ve ever grown a vining plant, you know how important it is to provide strong structures to which the vines can cling and climb. Bamboo is strong and easy to find at garden supply stores.
All 120 plants are divided among our four long tomato beds. I always grow an abundance of tomatoes to share and to make all the delicious tomato sauce I enjoy through the year. It’s a good idea to grow a range of varieties, including at least one or two disease-resistant types.
Many of this year’s tomatoes were grown from seed right in my greenhouse. I also have tomato plants that were gifted to me by a friend, and a large variety also came from Bonnie Plants, one of my favorite growers.
These are the large leaves of rhubarb. The leaves are toxic because they contain high levels of oxalic acid, but the fleshy stalks of rhubarb can be cooked and used to make a variety of delicious pies, tarts, cakes, cobblers, crisps, and pavlovas.
I planted onions, shallots, and leeks a few weeks ago and they are all developing nicely. Onions, shallots and leeks are harvested later in the summer when the underground bulbs are mature and flavorful. I always look forward to this harvest!
In this long bed, I have summer squash and zucchini.
Looking closely, one can see the squash growing.
The kale continues to be a big shower – look how beautiful this crop is. Kale or leaf cabbage is a group of vegetable cultivars within the plant species Brassica oleracea. They have purple or green leaves, in which the central leaves do not form a head. One cup of chopped kale has 134-percent of the recommended daily intake of vitamin-C – that’s more than a medium orange, which only has 113-percent of the daily C requirement.
And maybe you saw the Chinese cabbage on my Instagram page @marthastewart48. Also called Napa cabbage, these heads are oblong with green, crinkly leaves on the outside and creamy yellow in the center. I picked one not long ago and it weighed 15 pounds!
Broccoli is a hardy vegetable of the cabbage family that is high in vitamins A and D. And, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, USDA, the average American eats more than four-pounds of broccoli a year. I have so much broccoli ready to enjoy.
Here are the leaves of our cauliflower – so much growth in every bed. We attribute the growth to the excellent soil I have here at the farm. I use Scotts Miracle-Gro Organic Raised Bed & Garden Soil in all the beds.
My cabbages are also growing nicely. To get the best health benefits from cabbage, it’s good to include all three varieties into the diet – Savoy, red, and green. I am so pleased with all these vegetables.
Red, or purple, cabbage is often used raw for salads and coleslaw. It contains 10-times more vitamin-A and twice as much iron as green cabbage.
And here is one of my green cabbages – so perfect.
Savoy cabbage has crinkled, emerald green leaves, and a mildly nutty and sweet flavor.
Nearby is my bed of basil – both green and purple. Basil, also called great basil, is a culinary herb of the family Lamiaceae. Basil is native to tropical regions from central Africa to Southeast Asia. It is a tender plant, and is used in many cuisines. Since basil grows in tropical climates, it grows well in hot weather. We’ve had a week of temperatures in the 90s Fahrenheit and my basil is thriving.
This bed was recently planted with beans. My head gardener, Ryan McCallister, always keeps track of when to plant our crops and we always plant in succession, meaning we plant seeds every few weeks, so there is always something ready to harvest.
My green peppers are growing too. They are still quite small now, but it won’t be long before I’ll have a bounty of green, red, and yellow peppers.
And there is always spinach in my gardens. The leaves are so beautiful and so very tender and tasty. I grow spinach all year long for my morning green juice.
These are the leaves of my artichokes. Globe artichokes, Cynara scolymus, are popular in both Europe and the United States. Artichokes are actually the flower buds, which will emerge from the center of the plants.
Everyone always asks what I do with all the vegetables I grow. I share them with my family, but I also love sharing the bounties with friends, colleagues, and my hardworking crew here at the farm. I also provide fruits, vegetables, and eggs for photography and video shoots. And, of course, all my birds get vegetables too. I hope your gardens are doing well this season.
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