The Westbury Community Garden 6th Annual Tomato Tasting on June 1, 2019, was record-setting in many ways.
Most attendance
Most volunteers
Most fish bowl prize donations
Most funds raised
And most importantly
Most tomatoes (34 different varieties!)
The crowd favorites in three tomato categories were
Cherry tomatoes
1st place – tie – Apero and Matt’s Wild Cherry
2nd place – Sugary
3rd place – Sweet Million
A new variety this year, Apero, tied for top honors in the Cherry category. Yum!The tiny Matt’s Wild is surprisingly full of flavor!Sugary is as sweet as its name. It has about 9% more sugar content than other cherries.Can’t go wrong with Sweet Million. It’s always a great-tasting, prolific producer.
Saladettes
1st place – Verona
2nd place – Bloody Butcher
3rd place – Jaune Flamme
Similar to Juliet in size and shape, Verona has superior flavor.Bloody Butcher is a top producer and has great tomato flavor!Beautiful Jaune Flamme has citrusy, fruity overtones.
Slicers
1st place – JD’s Special C-Tex
2nd place – Rose De Berne
3rd place – Kellogg’s Breakfast
A new variety for us this year – JD’s Special was developed in Conroe, TX. It’s a Brandywine / black tomato cross yielding an earthy, complex flavor.This pink, thin-skinned Swiss tomato has a meaty texture and great acid/sweet balance.Kellogg’s Breakfast tomato produces extra large golden fruit with sweet, tangy flavor.
We hear a lot about the decline of bee populations due to pesticide use and other factors. Westbury Community Garden has plans to add an apiary, or honey bee habitat, to the garden’s 7-acre property to support these valuable pollinators. Our apiary plans include fencing to enclose the apiary area several Langstroth bee hive boxes…
WCG had a small but hardworking group of individual Volunteers working safely with our garden leaders. This was our last Workday for 2020. The volunteers pictured here helped immensely in preparing our Butterfly Beds both for winter and for 2021 Spring wildflowers to come. And also helped with turning the East Compost bin contents. Pictured…
A festival is coming to Westbury Community Garden on March 22, from Noon to 3:00 PM! And the best news… It is free and open to the public. Come out and browse the many exhibitor tents to learn about various gardening topics, permaculture, landscaping with native plants, coastal prairies and wetlands, Monarchs and milkweed, nutrition…
Texas Women’s University Volunteers came out to help the Westbury Community Garden for our monthly workday on June 25. This was their first visit here. They helped weed and mulch the front Butterfly Beds to help our native pollinator plants survive the long period of high temperatures and drought. We saw Pipevine Caterpillars, native bees…
Here are some comments and pictures from the VegOut! experience. From Becky Edmondson, Westbury Civic Club President. A BIG thank you to everyone who worked toward making this VegOut! event possible. The weather didn’t cooperate but I will tell you the 3 eight year old second grade boys I brought learned a lot! I had…
Six students from Bellaire High School National Honor Society and their advisor, Ms. Jennifer Kuhleman, came out to plant sunflower seeds in the maze on February 26. The students were joined by garden members Debbie Gordon, JaMera Gilbreath, Paul SoRelle, and Betina Wolfowicz. About 400 sunflower seeds were planted of the very tallest and longest…
