In our first year of selling produce at the Capitol City Farmer's Market we have learned a great deal. The most obvious lesson is that it is hard to sell tomatoes during a really great year for tomatoes. Pardon the cliche, but if I had a nickel for every time I heard someone walk by our stand and say, "Don't need tomatoes, got plenty of those" I would be a very rich man. In fact, if they bought all of our tomatoes at a nickel a piece, I would still be a moderately wealthy man. It isn't as though we didn't sell any of our tomatoes this year; we did. But the 85 plants we put in the ground were more than enough, as evidenced by the ripe red tomatoes still on our plants that we can no longer find the motivation to pick. I walk by the tomato garden, noticing the many tomatoes to be picked, and for a brief moment I marvel at the value of all those tomatoes if they were made into canned goods or slapped on a BLT. Then the moment passes, and I quickly move on, realizing that we have canned more this year than ever before, and unless someone wants to come and pick them, we are pretty much over it. So next year we will sell some tomatoes, but it won't be part of our business plan to make heirloom tomatoes a primary focus of our efforts. The market for tomatoes is only so big in a town where many people grow their own.
On the bright side, we found other crops to fill the void left by the tomatoes. Peppers have captured our attention as gardeners, and based on how well they sold it seems they have also captured the attention of our customers. Our bell peppers sold very well, with the small sweet red Buran peppers and orange bells selling the best. To our delight, they also produced remarkably well for the little amount of attention given to them. We see much greater potential in selling peppers than we do tomatoes - most gardeners grow their own tomatoes, but not as many grow peppers. So we figure that, with more attention and tender loving care provided to the peppers, we can improve on our yield from this season and to top it off we will almost definitely be able to sell them. That has been the big sticking point with our crops this year - we can certainly grow them, but can we sell them? What we have learned is that you don't really know until you try.
Onions are another crop we would like to expand upon. We didn't even plan to sell onions this year, but we had such a great crop of monstrous Walla Wallas and Red Zeppelins that we ended up selling quite a few just to get our personal stash down to a level where we could eat them all before they went bad. The Walla Wallas sold very well, but they have a major drawback in that they do not keep nearly as long as some other sweet onion varieties. We will grow some again next year, but only enough for fresh selling and eating. We intend to grow more of the Yellow Sweet Spanish, which we found to be a very tasty onion that keeps well. And on the advice of our fellow vendors, we will grow a nice sized patch of the Candy Hybrid onion, which keeps very well and is as sweet as a Walla Walla. We see good things ahead on the onion horizon... if there is such a thing as an onion horizon.
Another thing we learned is that we need to make our operation more efficient. This a recurring goal, as we are constantly looking for ways to grow more delicious food in the least impactful way that requires the least amount of effort. It isn't as though we are averse to hard work - that's pretty much all we do these days - but the more efficiently we can garden, the more we can grow and the more free time we have to do other enjoyable activities like camping, fishing, and simply getting some sleep. Our plan of growing less tomatoes and more peppers and onions plays into this, because the former are a giant pain to pick and the latter are relatively quick and easy. We have spent a solid 30 hours or more picking tomatoes this year, and we haven't seem much return on our time investment, so there is much room for improvement.
The most important upgrade in efficiency will be to install drip irrigation systems in all of our gardens. Currently we only use drip irrigation for trees, shrubs, and our small vineyard of grapes for winemaking, which we installed this spring. With the flip of a switch we can water over a hundred trees and shrubs all at once with great precision and without getting the plants themselves wet. That last point is important because watering from above with sprinklers creates a moist environment well suited for disease outbreaks. We have seen the evidence firsthand when we have used sprinklers. Drip irrigation, on the other hand, is simply black plastic tubing run along the ground to which many styles of emitters may be attached, ranging from micro-sized sprinklers to drippers that emit water at a specific rate, allowing you to figure out exactly how much water each plant received. If we install drip irrigaton to our gardens as we have planned, we can water everything at once without the specter of disease and conserve water at the same time. It is pretty tough to beat that kind of set up. Drip irrigation is also vastly superior to soakers hoses in that it lasts much longer before needing to be replaced and doesn't routinely spring leaks that send streams of water flying across the garden for no good reason. We tried the soaker hoses last year, and they were ok, but nothing compared to drip irrigation.
The growing season may be pretty much done with for this year, but we will still be making another market appearance or two in October. We have some goodies for you all, like
Mandan Bride corn flour of which we have
written on several occasions, and we've got some interesting popcorn varieties we would like to share with you, as well. See you there!
