Produce Sale

I mentioned in another thread I am making a go at being a market farmer. I work my kitchen job and do my farm. Hopefully next year it will just be the farm. Anyway, I sold my first bit of produce. It was 3 quarts of heirloom radishes. It was only $6 but it felt good to see some of my hard work turn to greenbacks. Have a good morning everyone.

a reply to: Piggy315

Good luck to you,one of the things I loved to do was work in yard and garden nice to watch things grow and a supply of fresh fruits and or vegetables,although I have always hated to eat vegetables,I love growing them

Make sure you wear gloves and boots when gardening.

Thanks guys, musicismagic the boots yes, after 15 years as a cook my hands are gloves unto themselves.

I try to grow radishes here and the plant never forms a radish, they get tall and go to flowers and seeds right away. My tomato plants get very tall and viney too, some get to twelve feet long, lots of tomatoes but not enough season to get ripe.

My potato plants can get eight feet long most times. I can get up to fifty baby potatoes on a plant but rarely anything bigger than two inches long. I like to boil those little potatoes, they are actually really good and I get about a bushel of those fingerling potatoes a year from the garden, the daughters and grandkids love them. I always save some to start next years crop. I got the original potatoes about six years ago, but do add a few potatoes that sprouted into the mix occasionally when planting. The weird stuff happening here with plants seems to be something to do with geo-magnetic energy, even putting things in planters with store bought soil results in the same things happening.

Good fresh produce right out of the garden is the cats meow. Keep going with your farming experience, some day you will have enough to eat throughout the summer and still get profit from sales to pay for having the gardens.

Congrats to you!

Just try not to fall prey the seemingly unbounded Kale Conspiracy!

RESIST!!

a reply to: rickymouse

Do you get those pods at the top? I did that last year, and those pods were better than the radish root. Kind of like spicy peas. I haven't grown them since, but when I do next, I'll be hoping for those pods again.

a reply to: rickymouse

Ahhh don't tell me that...I planted radishes this year.
I guess all I can do is cross my finger.

My cilantro seems to be doing the best so far.

Not much of a gardener so I hope I get as good a result as the OP.

a reply to: DrumsRfun

www.gardenbetty.com...

If you get pods, they're delicious 😋

a reply to: DrumsRfun

Loose soil and don't overcrowd them... Best thing about radishes is how quick they can form, you can have edible radishes within 4-6 weeks.

Maybe I pick things too early Failure is a big part of gardening though. Don't be afraid of things going wrong, I'm still useless at a lot of things. We live and learn.
a reply to: rickymouse

New potatoes are awesome, I always pick some when having a BBQ.

As for your tomatoes, do you prune them?

Depending if you're using a greenhouse or not... I always prune the second shoots and often stunt their height. I've had a lot of wasted tomatoes in the past so I always aim to force em to ripen a bit early and never allow too many tomatoes to form. Me and the plants asking too much seemed to be the problem.

a reply to: Piggy315

That's awesome

I hope the road you're on is long and fruitful. I'm getting a large allotment soon and plan on keeping chickens and growing stuff, who knows where it'll lead but hopefully it'll keep itself ticking over.

Gotta smile when someone is doing what they love and earning money from it

a reply to: Piggy315

My lady went totally commercial with her 1/2 acre garden. Only grows asparagus and delivers everyday to the fancy yuppie restaurants for serious $$$ and sells her surplus at the farmers market in the village.

originally posted by: snowspirit
a reply to: rickymouse

Do you get those pods at the top? I did that last year, and those pods were better than the radish root. Kind of like spicy peas. I haven't grown them since, but when I do next, I'll be hoping for those pods again.

Those are seed pods I think and we get lots of them. I never knew they tasted good or were even edible. I found this link to them after you told me about them. www.ruralintelligence.com...

I think I will try them since I cannot get the radishes to grow right, within three or four weeks the pods are fully formed. I was breaking them open for seeds to plant the next year, but gave up since I never got any radishes. I learned something new, I will have to try growing them for the seed pods now and I guess if you sprout the seeds they make a tasty addition to a salad too from what I just read. Thanks for the heads up

a reply to: rickymouse

I grow golfball sized radishes in rotation in my garden..picked my first row of this season last week.

As far as not developing a bulb, when the plant germinates and pops up, sometimes they won't be set deep enough into the ground.. if you can see any red on the base of the stem sticking out of the soil, that is your bulb..

It's not growing because it's not buried..

Simple fix.

Leave a bucket of good compost or top soil at the end of your row, every few days check the bases and add compost until red part is completely buried..
Add as needed after rain knocks the soil away too..


Potatoes..

Make sure you give them enough space between plants..No potato plant I've ever grown has ever been 8ft tall.. and I grow a lot.. we don't buy them anymore at all...the length alone leads me to believe they are stretching because of competition for Light.


Also potatoes like a steady water supply. Not to much at once, but a scheduled watering.

Do not pick the potatoes until the foliage dies of its own accord.. they know when there done...



Good luck bro!

Respectfully,
~meathead

a reply to: Mike Stivic

I grew up on a farm, I never saw potato plants look like eight foot vines, I never saw tomato plants get twelve feet long and produce three hundred cherry tomatoes to a plant or five pounds of regular tomatoes to a plant either. I no longer grow the tomatoes, I am actually allergic to them so I quit.

I got one and a half inch diameter maple trees here forty feet tall, you can cut them with sharp loppers. I counted the rings on a couple of them, they are between twenty five years and forty years old. The big maples have the middle rings all really hard, you cannot count them anymore, then they have maybe another forty to fifty rings real close, these eighty year old or more trees are only four to six inches in diameter and sixty to eighty feet tall. I had a birch tree that had a completely rotted center and I could not count those, but did count a hundred thirty something rings plus the bark contained another maybe twenty rings in it, which I have no clue if they mean anything.

Kind of interesting location, but I noticed on some high rocky areas that the trees also did not grow much in thirty years. Our trees have not grown much since we got here, I do not understand why, my orchard I planted had the grafting balls turn to a glass like wood and they died, too much minerals in the clay here I guess.

None of my friends who have been gardening for years had a clue why the plants are growing like that here.

a reply to: Piggy315

Forgot to say congratulations!

While a farmer's life may not be profitable, it is definitely rewarding.

That you are turning your love into money in a positive way is inspiring!

Happy harvesting!



Respectfully,
~meathead

a reply to: rickymouse

Sry my friend I was just trying to help

I worked at the BerryFarm in southbury connecticut
In my twenties , they were known for their tomatoes,
And you would need a step ladder to pick them..
So I have seen huge tomatoes.

After Randy died I worked at the gazy brothers farm in Oxford connecticut. I'm only saying that to give you an insight into my background.

I was not trying to seem like a know it all really , just honestly trying to help.

Iive in Sheffield vermont now ,north east kingdom.
On top of hardscrabble mountain, our grow season is insanely short. I no longer even bother trying to grow big tomatoes, I only grow cherries, and I'm out there every 3 days picking "sucker" joints..otherwise they would be gnarly bushes and wasting to much energy on foliage..

Again I apologize bro if I came across wrong, I know you are extremely knowledgeable about nutrition, I didn't know you grew up on a farm..



Respectfully,
~meathead

originally posted by: Mike Stivic
a reply to: rickymouse

Sry my friend I was just trying to help

I worked at the BerryFarm in southbury connecticut
In my twenties , they were known for their tomatoes,
And you would need a step ladder to pick them..
So I have seen huge tomatoes.

After Randy died I worked at the gazy brothers farm in Oxford connecticut. I'm only saying that to give you an insight into my background.

I was not trying to seem like a know it all really , just honestly trying to help.

Iive in Sheffield vermont now ,north east kingdom.
On top of hardscrabble mountain, our grow season is insanely short. I no longer even bother trying to grow big tomatoes, I only grow cherries, and I'm out there every 3 days picking "sucker" joints..otherwise they would be gnarly bushes and wasting to much energy on foliage..

Again I apologize bro if I came across wrong, I know you are extremely knowledgeable about nutrition, I didn't know you grew up on a farm..



Respectfully,
~meathead

I was out picking suckers every day on my tomato plants to try to get them not to grow, they grew too fast. I had a cucumber vine that the granddaughter and I watched grow for about fifteen minutes, it grew over a foot in fifteen minutes. I never realized that cucumber plants grow so fast. My cukes don't get very big either, but there are tons of little ones on the plants.

I have many friends give me advice on these things and come over and check things out, nobody has seen this kind of thing happen before. It could have something to do with the compass spinning in a circle in the back area of our yard, I really do not know for sure. I also get a lot of trees really leaning, and I cut some trees down one time, no roots on the tree, they went into a log running horizontally, and in ten years the branches grew up to about forty feet high on the log....they were trees. The log was burried with leaves, when I cut the three trees down I noticed the log they came out of. I cut the log in half and kicked it down to the fire pit, it was not even rotted, I suppose the trees were growing from it. I had cut that tree down about ten years before and shoved it aside with the tractor to line the path.

Weird area where I live.

originally posted by: rickymouse

originally posted by: Mike Stivic
a reply to: rickymouse

Sry my friend I was just trying to help

I worked at the BerryFarm in southbury connecticut
In my twenties , they were known for their tomatoes,
And you would need a step ladder to pick them..
So I have seen huge tomatoes.

After Randy died I worked at the gazy brothers farm in Oxford connecticut. I'm only saying that to give you an insight into my background.

I was not trying to seem like a know it all really , just honestly trying to help.

Iive in Sheffield vermont now ,north east kingdom.
On top of hardscrabble mountain, our grow season is insanely short. I no longer even bother trying to grow big tomatoes, I only grow cherries, and I'm out there every 3 days picking "sucker" joints..otherwise they would be gnarly bushes and wasting to much energy on foliage..

Again I apologize bro if I came across wrong, I know you are extremely knowledgeable about nutrition, I didn't know you grew up on a farm..



Respectfully,
~meathead

It could have something to do with the compass spinning in a circle in the back area of our yard, I really do not know for sure.

Weird area where I live.

I'd set up a sweatlodge at the vortex... or an alter..



I would love to see my cucumbers do that though.
I have almost a hundred out there now.. we are doing some major pickling this year

Respectfully,
~meathead

Thanks for all the support guys!