Gardeners' Club
Congratulations to all gardeners and allotment farmers on the start of the planting season! The sun has warmed us, and it's time to sow seeds for seedlings and prepare the beds. Every year I plan to reduce my plantings, but I still sow. And this year, I couldn't resist planting a few tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. It's often easier now... 
Most gardeners grow the familiar red and pink tomatoes in their plots. Other colored tomatoes—yellow, orange, purple, brown, and green—are starting to appear in greenhouses and gardens, but they're still considered rare and exotic varieties. I bought my very first yellow tomato by accident... 
The "Copper River" tomato variety was sent to me from Kazakhstan. I've always grown the most common tomatoes—pink and red. Then I got a yellow, very sweet tomato, "Buyan Yellow." But multicolor tomatoes (bicolors, multicolors) with two or three different colors held no interest for me. 
Blue Old Woman is another new variety in my collection. I'd never grown purple tomatoes before, only seeing them in pictures. Well, since I had these unusual tomato seeds, why not grow them! What I learned about... 
At the end of September, I couldn't resist planting winter garlic again. In my post about spring and winter garlic, I wrote that I wouldn't plant it in the fall anymore, as it often rots in the winter, either freezing or getting soaked. The same thing happened last year... 
The first frosts arrived in early October. The tomatoes in the greenhouses froze, the branches touching the walls and roof withered, while the side shoots near the ground stubbornly continued to bloom. The cucumber vines drooped. I pulled out the cucumbers and even picked tiny green cucumbers from them; they were sweet and crunchy. The peppers were untouched... 
Leeks, or pearl onions, are a green vegetable. They are biennials, with leaves and thick stems developing in the first year. If left in the garden over the winter, a flower stalk—an umbel with pink or white flowers—will emerge in the spring, and the seeds will ripen. Leeks... 
"Happy Captain" is another one of my newcomers this year (2020). The information online is that it's a mid-season, medium-yielding, tall, indented variety—1.8 m tall, with potato-shaped leaves. The fruits are flat-round, weighing 150-250 grams, green, yellow, and pink, juicy, with a light fruity flavor. I had two seedlings—weak, but... 
I grew rutabaga last year. I just happened to come across some seeds, so I decided to try it out. This is what young rutabaga sprouts look like: This is how they grew: A quick overview of rutabaga: Rutabaga is a healthy vegetable. It's rich in fiber, potassium, calcium, magnesium, beta-carotene,... 
When I got the seeds of this variety, I wanted to know the meaning of such an unusual name. It turns out there's a fabric dyeing technique that involves twisting the material into knots, creating multicolored stripes on the fabric. So, breeders developed this unusual tomato, drenched in a golden, pearlescent dye, and...