Category: Plant Sale

Many thanks to Farmer Shaun from Grow It Green Morristown who is growing Rutgers tomato seedlings for our 2025 Plant Sale. The following tomatoes will be available: ‘Rutgers 250’ and ‘Rutgers Scarlet Sunrise’ as well as Basil Devotion which is downy mildew resistant. Here are some details.

Rutgers ‘Scarlet Sunrise’ tomato

Released in 2020 by the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station from work done by Pete Nitzsche and Thomas Orton Bicolor grape tomato with intense sweet Flavor and moderate acidity.

Indeterminate, late-season, high yielding. Red and yellow crack resistant skins. Open pollinated. 70 days to maturity

‘Rutgers 250’ tomato

A reinvention of the tomato industry’s most significant variety, the ‘250 ‘was named in honor of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University.

Improved version of the classic Rutgers tomato that defined the flavor of the ‘Jersey Tomato’.

‘Rutgers Devotion DMR’ basil

From the breeding program of Dr. James Simon, Rutgers Department of Plant Biology & Pathology, and Dr. Andy Wyenandt at the Rutgers Agricultural Research and Extension Center.

Downy mildew resistant Genovese type basil. Uniform, upright growth and dome or cup-shaped leaf.

This final photo shows the many happy little tomato seedlings growing just for you!

The Friends are happy to bring you several articles about plants at this year’s plant sale by Bruce Crawford, Manager of Horticulture for the Morris County Park Commission. This article focuses the genus, Trilium (common name, Wakerobin or Toadshade), and talks about several of the beautiful species we can grow here.

Read Bruce’s opening paragraph, and click on the link below to open the full article in a PDF.

Click here to open the PDF.

Bruce Crawford, Manager of Horticulture for the Morris County Park Commission, has written another article for us. He uses Sanguinaria canadensis (common name, Bloodroot), to talk about early spring bulbs in general, but with a focus on this beautiful example.

Read the first paragraph, below, and click on the link below to open the full PDF.

Click here to open the full article.

Bruce Crawford, Manager of Horticulture for the Morris County Park Commission, writes in this article about Jeffersonia diphylla (common name, Twinleaf), elaborating about its description and history as well as using it as a primer on botanic naming.

After reading the first paragraph, below, you can click on the link to open the full PDF.

Click Read More to open the PDF.

So many plants and so little time! Here’s the link to the list on Google Sheets.

Once again, we couldn’t restrain ourselves and have ordered hundreds of different plant varieties so far for the upcoming sale.

You can sort it by using Google Sheets Data command, or you can download it as a pdf or several other things by clicking on File | Download at the top of the spreadsheet.

We’re still ordering some last-minute gems and adding new information, so come back soon to look.

The Plant Sale began in earnest Monday morning by putting shelving together and hanging lights before the “stars of the show’ (3,700 plants) arrived. The afternoon was spent organizing and tagging the plants for sale. We had fun. A very exciting start to a great Plant Sale!

Thanks to Heather Emelander for these nice pictures of the activities.

So many plants and so little time! Here’s the link to the list on Google Sheets.

Once again, we couldn’t restrain ourselves and have ordered almost 400 different plant varieties so far for the upcoming sale.