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Harlow Gardens – Get Em While Their Hot

Last modified on 2009-08-27 17:06:31 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Local Flavors From Bremerton

Green, yellow, orange and red peppers create a vibrant palate of color throughout Doug Millard’s garden in Bremerton.  It also contains a large number of tomatoes. At last Thursday’s Bremerton Farmer’s Market, Millard, who sells under the name Harlow Gardens, sold completely out of the 30 pounds of tomatoes he brought to market.

Hot Today, Gone Tamale

And he says it’s the beginning of what promises to be an excellent pepper season. Millard grows seven or eight varieties of which three are heirloom.  His peppers vary in heat intensity from the mild Bell to the blistering Habenero.

“I’ve had an interest in peppers for a long time,” says Millard who also dries and grinds his peppers to preserve them.

As a child growing up in Connecticut he developed an early appreciation for farming by working on his family’s large summer garden in Vermont.

Doug Millard Tends Harlow Gardens

“I really missed the taste of fresh home-grown vegetables so I decided to start growing my own,” says Doug who has been selling some of his produce to neighbors for awhile but ventured into the Bremerton Farmers Market for the first time this year.

Reaching High For Products of the Sun

And he’s always looking for and trying out new varieties of peppers.  Carefully preserved in air-tight packets, he’s ground many of his favorite peppers – some date back several years and have wonderfully complex flavors.  He also saves seeds for next years crops. Most of his pepper seeds have come originally from Johnny’s Seed and can be ordered on-line.

“I have an heirloom pepper’s seeds that probably won’t even be available commercially as a disease hit the market source this year and wiped it out,” Millard said.

But it’s not just the garden that thrives here. Everywhere you wander on the property, combinations of lovely plants, trees, shrubs and flowers grace about an acre of his three and a half acres of property – all are tributes to the skill and artistry he’s developed in more than 30 years of landscape design and construction. Also a 25-year carpenter and contractor by trade he’s made stunning improvements to his 1933 home.

Retiring from full-time work after a back injury doing carpentry, he’s now specializing in creating raised-bed gardens for people with disabilities and older people. And he’s into recycling in a major way – most of the planks he uses for raised beds are recycled from discarded cedar decks and his garden hoops come from recycled electrical conduit.  He’s also built a greenhouse so he can get early starts for his tomatoes and peppers.

His own carefully laid-out raised beds provide excellent examples of Millard’s handiwork.  Large tomatoes and lots of greens like kale, collard and mustard greens, Swiss chard, and spinach grow with abundance.  He’s also raising pole beans and different squashes.

Doug’s current garden is 60 by 70 feet, but he’s planning to put in an additional 50 by 70 feet garden behind this one. He’s also sporting prolific raspberry and loganberry vines as well as a couple of pear trees that had been rescued from construction sites in the San Juans. High wire fences protect his garden but he lost a hydrangea outside the fence to the ever-present deer population.

“That hydrangea was full of beautiful flowers and those deer ate every single flower in one night,” says Millard.

Doug Millard will be bringing large baskets of his delectable peppers and tomatoes as well as greens to the Bremerton Market this Thursday.  But you’d better come first thing to get some …they go out fast!  Through his company, West Sound Consulting, he’s also available for landscape design consulting and building his specialty raised beds.  He can be reached at westsoundconsulting@hotmail.com or by calling (360) 479-2974