In the greenhouse transplanting lettuces, planting green onions, watching carrots germinate, exclaiming over three days’ growth on the strawberries, smelling the fish emulsion and thinking spring thoughts…

Seed orders drive me insane.  On the one hand, I love seed catalogs. I love reading all the descriptions, looking at all the shiny pictures, deciding what we’ll trial this year.  On the other hand, the actual ordering is time consuming, expensive, and fraught with peril! (I’ve always wanted to include that phrase…)

The seed companies we buy from all carry the Dave’s Garden Watchdog* seal of approval. If they have negative reviews, we don’t buy from them. We don’t buy from many of the greats and former greats. We order from folks like Baker Creek, Heirloom Seeds, Victory Seeds, Southern Exposure and many others. We do order from a few market garden seed companies– those that sell whole ounces of pepper seeds or pounds of peas– but most of our seed comes from the same catalogs that home gardeners everywhere read and enjoy.

Then comes ordering time… yikes, what a project. I don’t spend this much time on my income taxes. 

By now I have memorized every catalog by its page layout– I don’t need to read the cover to know whose it is.  I can tell you how much each company charges for shipping and handling, how back ordered they are, and if they offer bulk prices for market growers. I can tell you if I’ve ordered from them before and what that order was. I can tell you who has the best-for-us Black Plum tomato seeds and who gives the most Jalapeño seeds for a dollar. I know how many seeds are in a 1/4 ounce, a gram, and a quarter pound. (This is good if you order from Johnny’s because they use all three to sell their seeds.)

And then we get to today– the actual ordering day.  By tonight I will have spent over $600 on seeds for the coming year. Eight seed companies will begin processing our orders and, as early as next week, the seeds will start to arrive in boxes, padded envelopes, and small packets.  Our database will begin to bulge with descriptions, days to maturity, soil preferences, and color/size/shape info. Charts will appear on the walls and planting lists for each week will be taped to the big wall calendar.

A bright side of seeds– we have seed-swapping friends all over the world.  These seed friends will send little homemade envelopes of seeds to try, just as we send little sample packets to them.  Some we’ve carefully harvested, dried, and saved; some we’ve ordered a few extra to spread the wealth. Our farthest seeds came from Israel, the closest from right here in Middleberg. Tiny gifts that won’t be truly opened until the fruit is ripened in mid-summer. 

And then the weather or the smell of the air or a breeze from the south says it’s time for the first seeds to be planted in the trays. Hundreds of miniscule bits will go into 288s (a seed-starting tray that holds 288 seeds), 72s, and 108s. Covers are fitted. Trays are slid into the germination shelves. Planting is recorded on a clipboard that will be bulging by mid-March. Soil is bought, mixed, packed into pots for the next batch.

It’s spring.

* http://davesgarden.com/products/gwd/

I got a letter from a fellow tomato grower today and he mentioned that his pepper plant babies were purple from phosphorus deficiency. Apparently being too cold can cause it. We first noticed it with the thyme plant we brought in a few weeks ago. Within a couple of days, the plant was completely green and the purple was gone. All the thyme in the greenhouse (unheated) is purple right now.

Here’s an article that mentions it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus_deficiency

Cool stuff you can learn in the garden!

Dev

 

Fall greens

Our tagline is

“We Grow Beautiful Food!”

We don’t ship bruised, malformed, dented, diseased, or ugly fruit. We believe that every vegetable is valuable, so the bruised, malformed, etc… go into our freezers and sauces. We sell the best we grow and we eat the rest. 

We also try to buy seeds for the most beautiful vegetables and fruits. Each year we try something new: red okra, an obscure hot pepper, a tomato that is supposed to like hot, dry summers. One year we’ll plant 25 different melons just to see which ones will do well here. The next year, we’ll trial all the pole beans we can find. This year we’re trying to find the best way to grow tomatillos and we’re adding lots of flowers to the vegetable gardens.

So why “beautiful food”?  We had a loyal customer at the Chickasha Farmers’ Market that would come to our booth and exclaim over our colorful assortment of peppers, “Oh!! You have such beautiful food! I want to buy all your beautiful food!” We didn’t know her name, but would refer to her as Beautiful Food (her name is Vivian, BTW). When I took a marketing class at OSU, I invented the tagline as one of my assignments. The tagline stuck and we’ve been using it ever since.

Native Roots Market has started a “Garden Club” which is an in-store CSA.  We will be supplying the weekly produce, Native Roots will supply recipes, coupons for in-store purchases, and samples and goodies from the store’s shelves.  The Garden Club will have three seasons:

Spring — March, April, May

Summer — June, July, August

Fall — September, October, November

A share for a 3-month season is $325 

Here’s what we hope to offer in March:

March Preview

• Radishes: D’avignon, Red, Ping Pong, Easter egg, Daikon
• Carrots: Orange, Purple Haze, Yellow Sun
• Asian Greens: Pak choi (baby), Mizuna, Asian Cabbage
• Greens: Broccoli Raab, Spinach, Mustards, Collards, Arugula, Kale, Nero Toscano (dinosaur kale)
•   Vegetables: Radicchio, Kohlrabi, Peas (shoots), Fennel
•   Alliums: Green onions, Baby Leeks, Garlic , Spring green, Chinese leeks
•   Herbs: Thyme, Mint, Chives
•   Potted Herbs & Cut Flowrs

Find out more at

http://www.nativerootsmarket.com

Planting news: The new hydroponic system is complete and will be fine-tuned today. The first butterhead lettuces to go in the system are just over an inch tall and will be transplanted tomorrow. According to the experts, these lettuces will be ready for the first Garden Club offering in March. To illustrate how much we trust experts, we’re planting loose leaf lettuce in the hoophouse as a back-up.

Planted carrots, radishes, Calabrese broccoli. Started herbs and flowers.

Ordered leek sets, fingerling potato seed, red and yellow onion sets.

Strawberry plants to arrive today.

The cattle panel hoophouse shown is the first design we tried and has now been in use for two winters. Cattle panels — also known as stock panels — are 16′ long X 52″ high. The price was about $15 each when we erected “Lettuce One” and they are now about $20 each. Lettuce One is 48′ long X 8′ wide and is about 6′2″ at the peak. There are two 3′ wide beds along each side and a 2′ walkway in the middle. When we put this up in the fall of ‘07, the total cost was $310. We estimate that the same one put up today would be about $400.

The end wall construction can be seen thru the plastic. There is a single eight foot 2X4 on the ground under the door that is “nailed” to the ground with two pieces of 3/8″ rebar. The door and that 2X4 and the angled braces were built flat and tipped into place. The rebar was hammered into the ground and the top of the door frame is strapped to the cattle panel.

Each panel is wired to the next one in 5 to 7 places. Wire is the green, plastic-coated clothes line available at Lowe’s — 50′ coils for about $9. Each panel is pinned to the ground with long hooks made from 4′ rebar bent into a “J”. Pound these in on a slight angle toward the center of the hoophouse so they can’t be pulled straight up.

This is enough to get you started. There are purlins running the length of the house to attach the plastic. The ‘08 improvement to this house was to attach wigglewire channel to the purlins to make the plastic attachment easier. We also moved the purlin closer to the ground so the interior drip is next to the wall and not on the plants.  Buy 12′ wide poly for the cover. The “skirts” take an additional 3′ wide piece on each side. If you buy a 100′ roll of 12′ wide (at about $130) you’ll have enough to cover the entire house and enough to cover two raised beds besides.

More tomorrow on this one and photos of the next generation– Lettuce Two.

Dev in OK
zone 7a

Cattle Panel Hoophouse - first design

Yesterday I wandered through the dead tomato plants shaking my head over all the tomatoes left behind.  I found four more good sized green ones and picked them, but it was very sad. There will be no more fresh-picked tomatoes until June 2009!

During tomato season, I have fresh tomatoes with every breakfast. I eat fried Spam sandwiches with mayonnaise and thick slices of tomato. I make spaghetti sauce with fresh tomatoes and peppers. There are always bowls, baskets, and plates of tomatoes in the kitchen. (Fruit flies, too, but that’s another post…) I love the colors, the shapes, the different textures of my heirlooms. I like taking mixed bags of cherry tomatoes to market. I like seeing boxes of tomatoes on my farm stand shelves and on the farmers’ market cart. I like walking through the tomato cages and plucking a fresh Sungold directly into my mouth. I like the smell of tomato plants and hot tomatoes growing in the sun.

I look up new varieties, swap seeds all over the country, and keep up with the TomatoMania Yahoo group. I take notes on how different varieties do in our hot and dry summers. I keep lists of new ones to try next year. There’s always a next year when you grow tomatoes…

I have a database of my tomato trials. Actually, I have a database for every year:  five years ago, I grew nine varieties; this year there were 73. About 350 plants.

What do we do with all of these? Sell them, can them, dry them, sun-dry them, give them away. Some trials produce little or no fruit (we’ve said goodbye to Brandywines forever), some produce enough to sell to specialty stores (love those Mini Orange and Fox Cherries!), some we grow just for our own canning (black plums) or drying (Principe de Borghese), or tomato sandwiches (Cherokee Purple). On a good day at the farmers’ markets, we can sell 100 pounds of tomatoes very easily– not that we always have that many.  They’re just so beautiful, people HAVE to buy them.

We grow beautiful food.

–Dev

We had our first frost last Thursday and frantically picked as many peppers as possible. We have (had) over 700 plants – 200+ which were grow-to-order Anaheims – so it took quite a few hours to harvest them. We didn’t even get to the Anaheim garden that day.

Yesterday I started on the Anaheim and Poblano peppers, but there are still about three bushels of Anaheims left to bring in! I have no idea what we’re going to do with all of them. We were growing these for a caterer and the fruit didn’t get large enough for their use until right at the end of the season. They’re perfect right now, of course.