I had a great time staffing a booth for Brighton Shares The Harvest with the directors from our local food pantries at the Market Day event Saturday, next to the Brighton Bloomin’ Buddies Garden Club and the CSU Extension Master Gardeners.

    A lot of people picked up information about Brighton Shares The Harvest, which is a community model with a mission to put more fresh produce on more tables in Brighton. We collected money to buy peaches and Sakata sweet corn from the Rotary clubs, all donated to the local food pantries.  Yoxall Creek, a local Community Supported Agriculture farm, also made a generous donation of corn, cucumbers and other farm fresh produce. For information on how you can help get fresh produce to our food pantries, visit www.brightonsharestheharvest.org.

    It was all about the farm fresh produce and the wonderful smell of roasted peppers and roasted corn, and meeting a lot of new people and seeing some old friends. I love to talk with people about gardening, whether it’s problems with their tomatoes (everybody seems to be having problems with their tomatoes this year) or their desire to find some red, hummingbird-friendly flowers that won’t take much water.

    The Master Gardeners brought a ton of information, and I was able to determine that even though some of my tomatoes have light orange and yellow spots on them, they are perfectly fine to eat. If your tomatoes are misbehaving, you can find a fact sheet at www.ext.colostate.edu. Click on “online publications,” Yard and Garden Publications, Fruits and Vegetables, Recognizing Tomato Problems, for descriptions, pictures, and suggested remedies. I also learned that tomatillos are ready to be picked when the fruit fills up the paper “lantern” on the plant, that you need two or more of them for pollination, and that they reseed quite freely.

    There’s a lot of season left for harvesting and sharing produce, and it is not too late to plant perennials for next year’s flowers. The biggest challenge for me when I plant perennials in late summer is to remember that they will need more frequent watering than their well-established neighbors. The second biggest challenge is remembering to plant them after I get them home. Last year I had some Red Birds In a Tree (Scrophularia macrantha) and some Vermillion Bluffs Mexican Sage (Salvia darcyi ‘Pscarl’) in their pots on my deck, and I was treated to several wonderful hummingbird visits. A little late-summer laziness is not always a bad thing.

    Note: Brighton Shares the Harvest’s August food drive is from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Aug. 28, at King Soopers, Safeway and Wal-Mart stores. The collected non-perishable food will be distributed among the three local food pantries.

    Volunteers are needed to work at the grocery stores Aug. 28 to greet customers, distribute information about the pantries and to sort the food. Also, organizers are ooking for donations of non-perishable good Aug. 28, especially canned meats, beans, peanut butter, cereal, pasta and rice, spaghetti sauce and canned fruits and vegetables.

    Call Linda Young at 303-655-1550 or e-mail lyoung_111@msn.com.