Today Missoni’s collection for Target goes on sale! I have always loved the crazy colors and patterns in Missoni textiles and I was so excited to see that there are some slightly garden related products in the line up. And that I can actually afford them.

I realize that a bike is not the most obvious garden tool, but I would love to ride it to our neighborhood nursery while wearing the big sun hat. Then I could come home and lounge on my modern patio furniture while eating a homegrown salad off the zigzag plates. Following that, I could slip my feet into my wellies, step out into my garden and snip a few cosmos and zinnias and put them in the cute black and white vases.

Even though the wellies are the only thing I actually need (my old ones have cracked and now let water in), I can’t wait to head over to Target and check the Missoni goodies in person!

Today over at Re-Nest I share 3 of my very favorite  small, family owned seed companies: Wild Garden Seeds, Kitazawa Seed, and Seeds from Italy. You can click right here to read more about why I buy seeds from each of these three companies, but I thought it also might be fun to name some of my favorite varieties here.

Wild Garden Seeds

‘Purple Peacock’ broccoli. Amazing cross between broccoli and kale. You can eat everything on this plant and it survives the winter in the Pacific Northwest. Fabulous!

‘Survior’ Italian parsley. A great, long lasting and  cold tolerant parsley with a nice taste.

‘Triangle Flashback’ calendula. This beautiful calendula is nothing like the garden variety orange one that is so common. It has tons of tapered petals and looks almost like a strawflower. Stunning on salads.

‘Delicata Zeppelin’ winter squash. This wonderful, delicious delicata squash has a great story. In the late 1990s a field of delicata squash that was grown for seed cross pollinated with gourds, resulting in fruit with a terrible bitter flavor. Pretty much every seed company in the country bought their seed from this source. This variety has been grown out from seed saved before the contamination and it is always delicious!

‘Flashy Butter Gem’ lettuce. I love this lettuce because it combines the color and flavor of my favorite lettuce variety, ‘Forellenschluss’, with the texture of my favorite types of lettuce, butterhead. It is is so pretty and tasty!

Kitazawa Seed

Misome. This is a spinach like green that grows well in cool weather. Very tasty and quick.

Tatsoi. Tatsoi is my favorite green for stir fries because each deep green leaf has a crunchy white petiole. Goes to seed quickly in the heat, but it is a great spring and fall crop.

‘Hojiso’ red and green shiso. The undersides of this green herb are colored bright violet. So pretty! Also very tasty in a cucumber salad.

‘Pak Choi’ green. Super pretty, easy to grow from seed and fast!

Seeds from Italy

‘Quarantina’ cima di rapa (broccoli rabe). This broccoli rabe matures in under 40 days, which means there is still time to get it in the ground for a fall crop.

‘Rossa di Treviso’ radicchio. Most radicchio that you find at the grocery store is round, but I prefer the elongated Treviso types. They have a slightly loose head, but the same bitter taste.

‘Super Marconi’ pole bean. The perfect green for grilling because the fat pods do not fall through the great. They have an almost meaty texture and a sweet, delicious flavor.

‘Cavolo Nero’ kale. A gorgeous black kale with deeply rumpled leaves. Grows well from seed and tastes delicious raw, stir fried, braised, and roasted.

‘Early Purple’ kohlrabi. I love to cut a kolrabi into matchsticks, drizzle olive oil and lemon juice over the top, plus a bit of coarse sea salt. It makes an excellent snack or a quick side dish.

(Image: ‘Flashy Butter Gem’ lettuce via Wild Garden Seed)

{My apologies to those of you  who were waiting for the September calendar. I scheduled this post, but for some reason it did not go live and I just noticed! I hope you can all still enjoy it, even though it is a bit late…}

I am excited to celebrate the end of summer and usher in autumn with Anne Bryant’s lovely September desktop calendar. I attended the Wild Mushroom Show put on by the Puget Sound Mycological Society several years ago and was astounded at the amazing amount of fungi, edible and not, that come out of the forests of the Pacific Northwest. This year’s Mushroom Show is coming up next month on the weekend of October 14th and 15th. There will be hundreds of species of wild mushrooms on display, a mushroom identification booth, and cooking demonstrations. It should be a super fun event, in the meantime you can download Anne’s calendar!

To put September’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image.

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Enjoy these last days of summer! Rumor has it that the weather will finally warm up here in the Pacific Northwest. I sure hope so, because I have a lot of green tomatoes on the vine right now.