Except for the mini-heat wave we had at the end of August, this has been a remarkably cool summer with all the inevitable pluses and minuses that that implies for the garden. On the plus side, my sugar snap peas lasted through just about the whole summer. I wish that I had given them a 10-foot high fence to climb on, for they seemed never to tire of growing upward. Other cool season crops were equally spectacular, especially the cole crops.

As an aside, I must mention that I tried growing spinach as a transplanted crop rather than simply sprinkling the seeds in the garden. From seedlings started indoors around the first of April, I set out a small patch, spacing each plant 6 inches from its neighbors. The results were most gratifying, as each plant produced an enormous quantity of succulent, dark green leaves. Bolting was quite delayed, perhaps by the stimulation of transplanting or possibly just because the weather was unseasonably cool. The beauty of this approach is that one can start the crop long before the garden is workable in early spring, and still grow the plants to harvestable size before summer spoils them.

On the minus side, our cool summer has given me my first complete crop failure in the melon department. Peppers also have been very slow to grow, although most varieties I tried have managed to set one or two fruits. And the big disappointment faced by almost every vegetable gardener in the state has been the incredible slowness to ripen of our much-longed-for crop of homegrown tomatoes.

Main season varieties such as Big Boy and Jet Star waited until the last few days of August before ripening their first fruits. With such a long wait, can an early frost be far behind?

People often ask me what are the best early tomato varieties to grow. Based on 18 years of experimenting with this crop in Maine, my up-to-the-minute response is as follows. Modern varieties of plum or paste tomato give perhaps the best early season performance if you value flavor and firmness of fruit as highly as earliness. Belle Star is a superb plum tomato which always bears with the earliest cherry and salad-sized tomatoes. Fruits are of the highest quality, excellent for eating and canning.

For a medium-sized regular tomato, I continue to believe that Jung’s Wayahead is the earliest variety with any eating quality. This variety is an old-timer, lacking in disease resistance but really shining in earliness.

Of course, nothing quite compares with a main-season, big, red tomato such as Big Boy. I’d always save space for at least a few plants of the large fruited varieties even if I could only enjoy their vine-ripened flavor for one week out of the year.

Another question that frequently arises is whether one can do anything to speed up the ripening process of homegrown tomatoes. The short answer is — not much. If you want to try a little natural chemistry, try picking half ripe fruit and placing them in a paper bag with two or three very ripe apples or pears for a day or two at room temperature. Ethylene gas, nature’s own ripening agent, will be released by the tree fruit, speeding up the tomato’s ripening process. Don’t expect quite the same quality as vine-ripened fruit, but it will still be way ahead of wintertime store-bought tomatoes.

One more aside. Mid-September is the time to snip the tops off of your Brussels sprouts to encourage swelling of the sprouts themselves. Leave all foilage below the crown if it is green.

We gardeners know that there isn’t much that can be done about the weather, and a hurricane named Andrew has given us another reason not to complain too loudly about the summer (?) of 1992.

Michael Zuck of Bangor is a horticulturist and the NEWS garden columnist. Send inquiries to him at 2106 Essex St., Bangor, Maine 04401.