VEGETABLES

Tomatoes | Cole Crops | Lettuce | Peppers | Squash/Cucumbers/Melons

Spring Ledge began 26 years ago as a vegetable market garden, selling locally grown produce to the Kearsarge community. We continue to grow our own produce on over 20 acres of land. We offer everything from tomatoes and corn to arugula, mesclun mix, eggplants and carrots. 
In the spring, we also sell vegetable transplants for the home garden. Many of these plants are chosen after successful use in our own fields. With our shortened summer season here in New Hampshire, and our cool nights, our vegetables tend to have short days to harvest and compact plant habits.

Tomatoes
The queen of the vegetable garden, tomatoes provide a great taste of summer. With our short summer season and cool nights, tomato harvest usually begins late in the summer and into fall. Here are some tips for pushing your tomato plants along for an earlier harvest.

Plant larger transplants. A larger transplant will be closer to maturity and harvestable fruit. Do be careful in choosing a large tomato plant, however, as there is such a thing as an overgrown transplant. One of the keys to tomato plant growing is to never let the tomato plant lose its momentum. This means buying plants that are not rootbound, do not have open flowers or fruit already formed, and providing heat and food for the plant from the moment you plant. 

Providing heat in late May in the garden in New Hampshire can be a challenge some years. One option is a wall-o-water. Another is black plastic mulch, which helps heat up the soil as well as reducing weed pressures and conserving moisture. We use black mulch on all of our tomato, pepper and eggplant crops in the fields at Spring Ledge. Applying a mulch of newspapers or straw helps keep the weeds down and the moisture in, but be careful to apply this mulch only after the soil has warmed up. If you put the mulch on when the soil is still cool, the mulch will keep the soil cool throughout the entire summer. Try warming up the soil before you plant by placing a clear plastic sheet over the area. This will trap solar heat and provide the tomato plant roots with a better growing environment. 
Another way of pushing along your tomato harvest is to prune the tomato plants. Tomato plants are classified as either determinate (bush type) or indeterminate (vining). Your pruning method will depend on the type of tomato plant you grow. 

On a determinate plant, such as ‘Sunbeam’, ‘Celebrity’ and ‘Patio’, the plant will set a certain number of trusses on each main stem and then stop. The trick is to prune all but one stem up to the first cluster of flowers, then let the rest of the suckers grow. 

On an indeterminate plant, the main stem will grow taller all season, to be stopped only be frost, disease or the gardener. Pruning these varieties, such as ‘Jet Star’, ‘Brandywine’, or ‘Sweet Million’, requires you to remove all the suckers from the base of the plant up to the top. 
Pruning the tomato plants will provide more nutrients to the remaining fruit sets. Plant support in the form of cages, trellises, or stakes provides a cultural method of pest management. By keeping the plants and the fruit off the ground, diseases are less likely to take hold, air circulation increases and the fruit is easier to harvest. 

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Cole Crops
Cole crops include all of the cabbage/broccoli family. Our spring and fall seasons are well suited to growing these cool weather crops. We offer cole crop transplants in 6-packs and in an assortment of varieties. 

Broccoli can be harvested several times. After you pick the central head, wait a few weeks for some side shoots to develop. Harvest these as they mature. An extra feeding of compost or organic fertilizer after the first harvest will boost the production of the side shoots. 

On all cole crops, the main pest is cabbage looper. This green worm blends in well to the leaves, and chews holes in all parts of the plant. An easy and safe remedy to this problem is Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). This natural bacteria is ingested by the caterpillars and forms proteins that destroy the insides of the caterpillars. We use this product on all of our cole crops here at Spring Ledge Farm. It poses no threat to humans, wildlife or beneficial insects. 

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Lettuce
Lettuce is an easy vegetable to grow even if you don’t have a garden. You can grow many varieties in a container on your porch or deck. Another advantage to lettuce is the ability to harvest leaves all summer long from a single plant. Anytime you harvest the leaves, cut them off one inch above the soil. The plant will produce new leaves that will be ready for harvest in a few weeks. After your first cutting, fertilize the plant with compost or an organic fertilizer. 
As the summer warms up, the plant may bolt, sending up a flowering stalk. When this happens, the lettuce leaves usually turn bitter. We offer a succession of lettuce transplants for sale throughout the summer. If you plant a lettuce crop every three or four weeks, you should have enough lettuce to provide salads into the fall. Of course, you can also sow lettuce directly into the garden, but provide for an additional 4 weeks of growing time. 

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Peppers
Peppers, which belong to the same family as tomatoes and eggplants, are a warm weather crop. Our area of New Hampshire provides a pepper growing challenge. Some years we have an excellent crop, some years not. As with tomatoes, any extra warmth you can gather into the soil and around the plant will pay off handsomely in earlier harvest (and some years, in any harvest at all). 

Choose pepper transplants that are not root-bound and have yet to form open flowers or fruit. Try the black plastic mulch or some other method of warming the soil. There is no pruning involved in pepper growing. 

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Squash, Cucumbers, Melons

Squashes, cukes and melons are grouped together here because of their similar growing requirements. They are also a warm season crop, doing best planted in warm soil and supplied with plenty of water and fertilizer. Black plastic mulch, or black paper mulch, will help warm the soil as well as deterring weed growth and conserving moisture and nutrients. 

Space the plants adequately in the garden, providing room for the mature plant. We sell transplants at Spring Ledge in 3 inch peat pots. We plant 3-4 seeds in every pot and these pots are meant to be planted directly into the soil. No need to disturb the root systems by removing the pot. The roots will grow right through the peat as its disintegrates into the soil. These transplants are also meant to be planted all together in one hill. Don’t separate the seedlings as this will result in crop failure. I tried this once early on in my gardening career, thinking that I would have four plants for the price of one, and I ended up having no plants for the price of one. 

If you are planting seeds, follow the directions on the seed packets. Most will advise to plant 3-4 seeds per hill about 3 feet apart. 

To avoid the inevitable onslaught of massive zuchinni harvests, try planting successive hills every four weeks. This will provide fresh and tender zuchinni all summer long. We harvest our zuchinni when it is only about five to six inches long. The fruit is very tender without many developed seeds. Delicious. 
Cucumbers should be harvested 

Melons are harvested when 

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