Week 51 2019

We’ve been pretty busy with getting the market garden going and trialing everything we think we want to grow for market next year. This is everything that we’ve been up to over the last month.

Deer/Perimeter Fence

We finally finished up the fence. We installed the top 4 wires along the whole fence to get the height up to 8 feet so hopefully no deer can hop over it and eat our produce.

Market Garden

Big updates here, we are getting a lot of produce and things are going really well!

We added gutters to our high tunnel. When it rained, water poured into the inside of the tunnel and onto the outermost beds. It caused the whole row of carrots not to germinate. The other reason is for future rain water catchment. The gutters are removable. In the fall we will need to shut the sides and we can remove them and roll the sides down.

July has been a harvesting adventure. This was our first year with success growing eggplant. We are drowning in cucumbers and eggplant but working hard to stay on top of the tomatoes.

Here are some pictures of the inside tunnel as the month progressed.

There is a real sense of appreciation and a neat story with these tomatoes that you can’t see. They are not anything you could get from a seed store. We were gifted these seeds from a local farmer that has been growing them for 30+ years. They are a Roma tomato variety dubbed “Large Roma”. They are well adapted to our local area, being grown within 20 miles of our home for over 100 years. Over time, the seeds were saved and selected to produce a large canning Roma with great flavor.

With the average age of farmers at 58 years old nationally, farming is losing valuable information and practices. Many farms have no younger generation to pass this information down to. We feel privileged to have these and honored that our favorite farmer trusted us with them!

We additionally were gifted some old heirloom “Big Red” slicing tomatoes and beans from the same farmer. Both with the same hyper local origins.

We try to use the abundance of produce when we can to store for later, canning, freezing and dehydrating.

We use what we harvest in our daily meals and are giving a lot away this year to family, neighbors and friends. Know your farmer…you might get free produce!

We visited a few local farmers markets to scout out where we will set up for next year. We found that no market in our area had a lettuce producer. Seeing this as an opportunity we started summer lettuce successions and will aim to grow lettuce all year round to provide consistent supply to customers as our main crop.