Failures and Fizzles

“No one likes a know-it-all,” my wife informed me.
“Geez Louise, I did not know THAT!” So endowed with this fresh spirit of humility by my spouse, I think I will write about the things that did not go right in my garden this year.

My pumpkins, which I had hoped to sell as fall decorations and Halloween jack-o-lanterns, totally failed. Despite the vines getting off to a great start, they were too far from the house to irrigate and after the drought, the squash borers, the squash bugs and the cucumber beetles got done with them, I couldn’t find enough plant residue to pick up to put in a compost pile. The field was just bare sand.

I have never seen more apples on a tree than were on mine this summer but that apparent blessing proved a curse since the drought caused almost all to fall from the tree early. I buried about five wheel barrow loads of apples into my garden and compost pile and managed to salvage only about a bushel for us to eat. If you don’t have an apple tree you might consider growing a few rhubarb plants instead; rhubarb makes a very similar tasting pie, ripens in the spring not the fall, doesn’t require the dormant oil spraying and pruning and takes up only a fraction of the space of a tree. I have a brother who will take rhubarb pie over apple any day.

I am starting to hate carrots, what with all the slow germination, thinning and weeding. I have nothing to show for all the effort. I will try one more year and if I don’t get results I will just replace them in recipes with the much easier to grow butternut squash or sweet potatoes. I turned my sister onto growing sweet potatoes this year and in her words, “All I did was plant them and harvest them.” The butternut squash has a shell so tough it is hard to cut with a knife and so it is not bothered much by the pests that do in other squash and pumpkins. Mine grew well between my rows of sweet corn so space was not an issue.

The garden literature describes how wonderfully productive fall gardens of cold hardy crops can be. I have witnessed my sister keep chard and kale growing all winter long in a cold frame made of straw bales with some storm window glass placed over the bales. So I made plans to grow a robust fall garden of cabbages, beets, chard, kale, lettuce and spinach. These crops may do well during the cool, rainy weather of fall but in September the young seedlings took a total smack-down from still ubiquitous insect pests and never got established. Even though I watered daily I got zip for my effort. So my pipedreams of cooked greens, salads and slaws in mid winter remain for another try next year. I think I may broadcast some turnip seed next autumn; that should have the most chance of success.

Lest you consider me a total loser by this point let me say that I was successful in producing significant garden produce for each month of the year despite my fall fiasco. We ate salads almost daily in the spring; we ate huge quantities of melons all summer and into the fall along with potatoes, green beans, corn etc. For this fall I have a good stock of butternut squash and sweet potatoes to get us through to spring. In our freezer there are still some bags of frozen summer produce: cherries, corn, green beans, tomatoes and bell peppers, but I expect these will finished by the new year.

I realize this sufficiency kick of producing some of our food year-round is just a game, but a retiree needs some games to pass his time and I would be really awful at basketball or golf. My wife has a venison roast in the crockpot that I need to go check on now so I better sign off for today as your very, very humble GRAND GURU OF CHEAP!

Hiatus

Wow!…I have taken a real break from blogging; it has been several months since I last wrote one. My last blog was around the time I began marketing watermelons. Then after Labor Day I had to clean up several acres of weeds that had grown among the melons… in places they were taller than me and big around as my wrist, so that was a real chore. Next I had to till everything and sow a winter cover crop of ryegrass. By the time I finished that, the maple leaves needed raking for several weeks and to be piled in wire pens at the end of my vegetable garden to be ready for next year’s mulch. Ah hell, why lie…I haven’t been all that busy; I just wanted to walk the walk a while and skip talking the talk. I always thought writing was best saved for the dreary days of winter, anyway.

Well it is mid November now and pretty darn dreary. I think we will get a welcome rain today. We have had one halacious drought this summer; we are about 16 inches short of normal rainfall for the year. It got so bad that local news reporters were asking the man-in-the-street when the last rain was and got dumb-founded looks from people who could not remember.

Luckily I had drip irrigation and a good deep well, so watermelon production was good; the drought only made the melons sweeter. Although I had a lot of complements on how good the melons tasted, two people stopped eating them because the watermelons messed with their blood sugar levels. I grew seeded crimson sweets which ran about 30 pounds on average and a seedless melon that averaged around 20 pounds.

Still everything was not totally hunky-dory. Production is one thing but marketing is another story. I am really a greenhorn at vending and not a natural people-person anyway so I am really slow at getting into the marketing aspect of gardening. I added a small town grocery as a customer this summer. To try to get my toe in the door, I did not take any money until after the melons sold; basically I was selling on consignment. Any risk of the melons going bad, or breaking or customers demanding replacements (which no one did) did not fall on the grocer so that she could not lose by selling my melons. I know store managers must hate to pay for produce up front and then end up throwing it in the dumpster because it went bad.

Even with me assuming the rot and breakage risk, I knew the store was not going to make that much selling watermelons at $3 and me collecting $2. There just wasn’t that much direct financial incentive. The real incentive for the grocer was that if I could provide extra sweet and large melons at $3 apiece then the melons became a weekly “draw” item which would pull customers into the store where they might do all their shopping. This indirect financial incentive was much stronger than the direct incentive of a mere buck a melon. When I started getting feedback that the grocer’s customers were complementing my produce I knew I was in. Best way to keep a customer is to make your customer’s customers happy.

I had one trick that served me well. The migrant workers in our area clear pick melon fields, probably taking some that are big enough but not completely ripe. They also pick melons a little early because they must be shipped to fairly distant city markets before being shelved and sold. My melons were picked ripe for selling immediately and not just ripe enough to ship. Those were my three marketing ideas: (1) make the produce risk free by selling on consignment,(2) making melons a “draw” item in the store, and (3) making sure the melons were ripe and sweet.

Farmers markets present the strongest possibility for garden produce sale. A lot of people have gotten into the idea that they need to buy local produce rather than produce shipped from 1,500 miles away. I got my feet wet in local farmers markets a few times this summer. It was nice keeping the whole $3 per melon and not sharing with a middleman but then there was also the sitting in the sun waiting for a sale while I could have been doing something else. Still, I feel local farmers’ markets have the most potential for sales. There are two such markets on weekdays at our two large hospitals in Evansville and we plan to look into those next year.

During this year my wife let me know that the watermelons were my baby and that I had better not get the idea that she was going to do any marketing for me AT ALL! When I made a small profit at the end of this season and told her I would need her help spending it, probably on a road trip vacation, her attitude seemed to mollify considerably. She indicated that she might be willing to deal with customers at the hospitals’ farmers’ markets while some big dumb hunk carried watermelons to car trunks. She is much more of a people person than I am so it may work out.

So that is what we have been up to since I stopped blogging in July. I have emphasized the marketing aspect because that is where I am weakest and every small producer needs to think a marketing plan through or be left with a lot of produce to compost. I buried eight pickup loads of melons in my vegetable garden after Labor Day.