Growing For Market (part 1)

This blog post took a bit longer to put together because I was working with my kiwis. I'll fill you in on the very next post. For now ... back to the main story (2005):

We had this still mostly blank canvas. So what did we really want to grow in our backyard and sell to become part of the local food movement? What were those "diamonds"? Here is how we started to go full time into producing tomatoes, and garlic (and a few too many other things).

Neither of us to our knowledge had ever tasted fresh garlic before, but with relatively little effort we were able to grow our own and sample six different kinds the previous year. The flavor and quality was surprisingly good. A quick analysis showed that garlic will multiply 10 times in one year under good conditions and by saving the biggest heads, the next year's crop was supposed to get better. So that fall we ordered several small bags from a garlic farm in California before they sold out.


Above left is what they look like in the fall after they sprout and apparently go to sleep for the winter. Then on the right is at the peak of their growth in the spring. It's a beautiful thing. The large, bluish leafed ones are elephant garlic.

While the garlic was growing, we committed to bed construction to get ready for the hundred plus tomato plants and other things whose "fruit" we planned to grow and sell.


A large section of the yard was rototilled in the fall to "break the sod" and Crimson Clover was broadcast seeded and raked over. That's it. And being a legume it did it's thing to trap nitrogen and grow miles of roots to break things up. For a while, the bees and butterflys loved it. Later, at about this stage of growth in the spring it was simply mowed and left in place as mulch.


This was a one time conversion of bare ground into raised beds. Tilling, double digging and adding manure to build up areas that can be reached across. Soil from the paths was scooped up into the beds which will never get walked on again after this prepration. The paths needed to be wide enough for a wheelbarrow or mower.


This is after a rainstorm where you can see the terraces in action. Most of the water can't flow more than a few feet so it just puddles up and soaks in slowly.


This is the lowest flat area where you can see some of the perennial herb and flower border shaping up. The soil works so nice after incorporating the Crimson Clover cover crop. On the far right are a couple of the fruit trees leafed out among temporary, smaller raised beds. The plan was to move that good soil somewhere else when the trees got big enough to take over that space.

We are still amazed at the level of effort we put into this. We actually quit our jobs to work on this. "The Tomato Years" was a nice break from corporate America and a re-focus of values and energies.


We also started playing with lettuce and other greens like swiss chard and kale, suspecting that although valuable, it would be labor intensive. We were right. It is extremely perishable and has to be washed, spun dry and kept in moist refrigeration for hours which is kinda hard to do in an open-air market on a Saturday morning with no electricity. So we bought a couple of huge coolers and just kept a few bags on display.

Tomato time...


Starting tomatoes early in the garage with racks of florescent lights and shelves. There are enough here to plant all we have room for plus a couple of hundred to sell. We were very active in trading heirloom tomato seeds so we probably had 50 varieties represented. Since then we have cut back to 10 or so favorites that we save seeds from, although every year there seems to be two or three new ones to try.


Tomato beds with straw mulch and garlic hanging to cure on the shed porch. After that "string" year we always grow tomatoes inside big wire cages which dramatically reduced the maintenance while increasing the lifespan (and productivity) of the plants.


A view of the lower bed with a cucumber trellis in the foreground and more tomatoes farther down. We were trying to get the most out of our still immature backyard and having a blast doing it. Did you notice the abundance of bamboo? It grows in large patches in protected areas around here. However it only lasts for one or two seasons for structures that are in contact with the ground. Our current raised bed frames are made of copper treated deck boards screwed to landscape timbers planted vertically. In 5 or 10 years when those rot out, We may use stone. Won't that be nice!

That's all I have time for ... in coming posts I'll tell of our experiences at the local farmers' markets. It was great having people waiting for us and coming early to buy vine-ripe, homegrown, heirloom tomatoes, but I almost got a bigger kick out of selling the plants early in the season.