Everything Covered?

Our cover crop. "Sit Copper! I said sit! Copperrrrr!" (Our Jack Russel Terror!)

Our organic transplant venture for our value added products is off and running. The input supplies have started trickling in. Our soil, flats, peat pots and some of our organic seeds have arrived and we will begin sowing seeds this week. I’m still waiting for some seeds to come in and then we will have everything ready. We will be doing a bell pepper, a slicing tomato, cherry tomatoes, jalapeno pepper, six different herbs, broccoli, cabbage, and eggplant. That should be a good assortment. If they don’t sell, I can use them in the trial gardens. I just hope I can have them ready quick enough to make it to the market and to a trade show I hope to exhibit at. That gives me about 5 weeks. That should just make it in time. We will see. I hope the weather works with us. Keep your fingers crossed.
Our cover crop of ryegrass is doing well. I planted it to keep the weeds down in our warm season crop area. It looks great and it did do an excellent job of keeping weeds to a minimum and it will add organic matter to the crop area. In retrospect, I should have planted a nitrogen fixing cover crop to add nitrogen to the soil. I have been doing some research on this and am still figuring out how to effectively use cover crops. It is a different concept from conventional growing on how to fertilize plant by getting the soil fertile enough to grow a crop. In conventional growing you just keep dumping fertilizer until you reach the fertility level you need. I just read a very good article from HortScience (43:27-33. Use of the Cover Crop Weed Index to Evaluate Weed Suppression by Cover Crops in Organic Citrus Orchards) from this month. The study was in a section on organic horticulture research. The article was from the University of Florida (my alma mater, Go Gator Nation!) on the cover crop effectiveness in reducing weeds in young citrus trees. They used combinations of plants, both annual and perennial. Their research indicated that mixtures of annual plants were the best plants to use, and provided both organic matter and kept weeds to a minimum. They used a novel and simple index for the cover crop effectiveness in reducing weeds. They took the weight of weeds and divided it by the weight of cover crop and came up with an index. Any ratio over 3 was deemed effective.
I harvested cauliflower and dandelion from our trials. The dandelion was bitter but that is my fault. I should have harvested it about three weeks ago. The cauliflower tasted great. It was the freshest tasting cauliflower I have ever eaten. I hope I’m not being too biased but it did taste excellent.

Bunny Buffet

This last week the Economist magazine confirmed our observations at the market last week. I just read that people will pay more for the same products because they view the purchase as getting a better quality or a preceived benefit. They view a lower price as being an inferior product. We will increase prices accordingly. Why turn away customers by being too cheap? This week I have decided to add vegetable and herb transplants to our line of produce. I am also considering cut flowers to sell at the market next fall for our value-added products. It has been hard to locate organic inputs to grow a fully organic transplant. The normal horticultural supply chain raises their collective eyebrows when you mention a need for the inputs to be certified organic. I hope to start planting tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, maybe some cole crops and herbs this week for our transplant line.
I have liquid fed the garden with my fertilizer mix. I have planted radishes, bunching onion, and Swiss chard. To see how well they do as well as get a fast crop of radishes to sell at the market to broaden our mix quickly. I have pruned the deciduous trees (e.g. peach, nectarines, and plums). These are low chill varieties bred for our location and climate. I harvested a few of the largest carrots from the plots this week. I have never grown carrots to harvest before, that I can remember. It was really exciting to pull them from the ground and see what has been going on down there since we planted them. It is very satisfying to know that I was able to grow marketable carrots. (I know they are not very straight, but probably still marketable.) I guess part of the excitement was not knowing how they were doing until I pulled them up from the ground. I harvested them mainly because the curiosity was killing me and to thin out clumps that were clustered too close together.

Off To The Market

I pulled out of our farm at 6:oo on Saturday accompanied by the sounds of bluegrass emanating from our local independent radio station WNMF 88.5 "Always at the extreme left on the radio" as one of their DJs likes to say. You can take this both literally and figuratively. It seemed somewhat fitting to go off to the market with an older type of folk music playing. I know that it is commonplace for some to go with their wares to the local market, but it felt refreshingly new and I felt somewhat nostalgic for a bygone era as I headed down the road in pitch blackness. The weather was great all day about 70 F and a little overcast so it was not too hot. I only had curly mustard greens, which were cut the night before, washed, bundled, and put on ice in a cooler. The other item was Hamlin oranges, which were also washed, and placed in an old wash tub. They looked awesome. Our oranges look great this time of year with a little chill to change the color and raise the sugar levels. They really sparkle with a little wash. To fill in the booth space I brought a truckload of plants from the nursery side of our operation. Everyone liked our booth display and I passed out all of the business cards I had from the interest in our plants. I sold all the oranges and eventually sold out the remaining mustard to The Corner Store, which is our first customer for our produce. I had numerous people tell me that our produce prices were too low. One woman who was snowbirding from New England stood there in disbelief and kept repeating the phrase, "Twelve oranges for $1.00?" I kept saying that was correct. She bought a dozen. I even had the other organic grower come over and tell me that my prices on the greens were too low. She was selling her bunches for $2.00 and mine were $1.25. She sold out and I had the majority of mine left before The Corner Store bought me out. Go figure! Jenn told me she thought our prices were too low. I am going to let her set the prices from now on. I also realized that people really couldn't buy landscape plants at the market. People can’t walk around with a seven-gallon shrub that they impulse bought to place in their landscape. I need to work on our product mix! Maybe some vegetable or annual transplants for the spring might work better, or some small "Wow" plants.
I did learn a lesson about value added products. The Corner Store was juicing our oranges and putting them in a cup and selling it for about four times the amount I sold them for. Another gentleman was selling organic jams and jellies he made the night before. He set up in about 20 minutes, had one table, had about as much value in the space as I did, and he almost sold out. He was selling his jars for $5.00. I was selling plants that took me three to four months to grow for $2.00. I had to deal with all the weather, the water, insects, and diseases. I will start thinking hard about value added products. We did cut up the oranges for people to try them. That was Jenn’s idea. It certainly helped us make some sales. Some people would start walking away from our booth with an orange slice and then come back and purchase some. If you have any other ideas for marketing or value-added products for the market you are welcome to share it with us and others on this blog.

My father bought us an action-hoe or loop hoe the kind that looks like a stirrup. I used it to weed in the trial garden. I love it. Thanks Dad! You didn’t have to do that, but I really appreciated it.

I added a little fertilizer to the beds to help them grow out of the freeze damage. Half of our tomatoes died in the transplant flat. I think that it was too high a salt content in my liquid fertilizer. I checked the salt level with a meter I have and it was off the charts. This week I diluted it down by 5 parts water. I kept thinking that the seedling lettuce looked much better than expected with a one time feed with a liquid fertilizer. They were probably right on the border of death with extreme fertilizer. Note to self: Always check the salt level of new batches of liquid nutrients. This was a very valuable week in terms of the volume of knowledge we have gained!