The City of Renton, through it's Parks and Recreation division, rents table space to the public in a very large heated and ventilated greenhouse. You can rent half a table for six months for 24 dollars.
I've been doing greenhouse gardening there for several years. Recently rumors have been growing that the greenhouse and the large pea-patch next to it will be closed and torn down to make room for a Renton city employee parking lot. I hope the rumor proves false, or that the public can fight this, because greenhouse gardening is fun, satisfying, and worthwhile. But it's not the direction the City of Renton is taking. The last few years Renton is all about growth, and is fancying itself an "eastside" city like Bellevue, even though most of Renton is more of a "southside" city like Auburn.
It's a two way street. With development and the goal of attracting high quality housing stock, new and good restaurants are inevitable. But what could be lost will be Renton's unpretencious working class roots: Renton was a coal mining and farming town. Greenhouses insinuate something that unsophisticated hicks use.
All that aside, once again I have started vegetables that I will later transplant to the backyard veggie garden.
At this point, I have 19 tomato plants; 7 are Halladay Mortgage Lifter, a variety that thrives in our climate and produces very large, sweet , juicy, and ugly tomatoes, and also a dozen cherry tomato plants.
Also growing are 15 melon plants- 5 canary melons, 5 Ukranian cantaloupes, and 5 "passport", a tropical, very delicious creamy tasting melon that looks like a cantaloupe from the outside and a honeydew inside.
Then there are the peppers: 5 "senorita", a mild jalapeno, and 8 "Giant Marconi", a long thick walled mild pepper thatis almost smoky tasting and is superb for roasting.
Often many of the seeds I start don't come up at all, but this year things are growing like gangbusters, and I'll have many more plants than I'll have the energy to transplant.
Mikelle and Tin Foil- Can I foist some on you?
1 comment:
Tomatoes can be kind of tricky around here. There have been some rare years where there wasn't enough sun to turn them red, and generally speaking, the big beefsteak types don't do well here (except for Freakazoid Freddy's magical Halladay Mortgage Lifters).
However, there are plenty of early varieties that do just fine .
As long as you give them water and decent dirt, I'll guarantee the best red tomatoes you'll ever eat, or double your money back!
And if you order before midnight tonight, each tomato plant gets accompanied by a Freakazoid Freddy
magical pepper plant. Fry with it, roast with it, chop it, grate it, Freazoid Freddy's pepper plants have endless uses! And that's not all....
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