Niemela's Market Gardens: July 2015

Things are going well here, and have been going well at market. Thank you to all of our wonderful customers- we've been going home early from market, always a nice thing. To get there, sell the produce, and go home to work on the gardens there. :) Here's a shot of last Saturday's table, before the folks started showing up, and cleaning up the goodies. Set up, keep loading out of the coolers into the display tubs, then take down the tables and go home to get back into the dirt. :)

Love those shiny radishes!!

After tying up some tomatoes in Tunnel #1, which was moved over and is planted to tomatoes, cukes, basil and peppers, I took a scoot around to get some other pictures of how some other stuff is doing here. Sungolds are coming along quite well in Tunnel # 2. We've been keeping them tied up and pruned, and have even had a small handful of them turn ripe.

Sungolds.....

We have these ones pruned to 2 leaders. Basically, we remove every side sucker that sprouts in the notch by the leaf, until the one directly BELOW the first flower cluster. The one directly below the first flower cluster then becomes the second leader. When done when the suckers are still small, they are easy to pinch off. When they are pruned, it makes the plant much more manageable, without all the side growth getting in the way; and it is supposed to allow earlier ripening of the fruit. Tomatoes are a tropical perennial, grown as an annual in our climate. Allowing all the vegetative growth may work well in the tropics; here, our growing season is a bit shorter, to say the least. :) So the plant needs to be somewhat curbed and made to work for us; cut back some of the vegetation, and force the plant to use some energy to actually make and ripen fruit.

I missed a small sucker on this plant.........

Which I snapped off, after snapping a picture of it.

You can see the sucker shoot, to the right of the second twirl of orange string. The scar above the second twirl of string is a shoot that was removed previously, and has healed over nicely. Anyway, on to other things.

Gypsy Broccoli, next to my #10 boot to show the size.

Tendersweet Cabbage.

These plants are growing where our pigs were rooting and fertilizing last summer; they seem to like the soil there. I use the pigs to dig up areas we need for the following season. They do a wondrous job, eating through the weed and grass roots, working the soil deeply as they root, and all the while dropping fertilizer as they work. We work the soil with the tiller behind them, let it mellow and rot down over winter, then till a couple more times in the spring, and it's ready to go. It probably helps that these plants are growing in a little valley, the soil tends to be richer and damper in a lower area anyway. We have a couple piggies this year, named "Hammie" and "Sausage". They are busy rooting around, working some areas I need for planting next season. We raise them to eat them, so we don't like to name them cute pet names like Wilbur (wasn't that the name of the pig in Charlotte's Web?) or Petunia. If you call them food, everyone including the little tykes know the end result we're shooting for, and don't make pets out of them. Not to say that I don't think animals should be well cared for, if they are destined for the dinner plate. No sirree. I think animals should be raised kindly and decently, given a good life and lots of food, then butchered quickly and processed properly. In the Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery, a pig raiser who contributed to the pig section of her book told the way to gauge happiness in pigs, and I quote, "Dirt on the snout, as a measure of contentedness, depends on where the dirt is. No dirt means not happy. Dirt half way up the snout means happy. Dirt up past the eyes means ecstasy." End quote. I think raising pigs on a concrete floor out of the sunshine without an opportunity to ever root, is no way for a pig to live. They should have dirt to root in, so they can "express their pigness", as Joel Salatin from Polyface Farm would say. Well, I shouldn't hog up all the space on this post talking about pigs, so let's move along here. :) Whoops, one more, then we'll go on.

Hammie "expressing his pigness", while Sausage looks on in approval.

Giant of Italy flat leaf parsley.

Muir Lettuce

Don't know why this machine started flipping the pictures lengthwise, rather than sideways like normal. It'll be a change of pace for your eyes. :) Now it's back to normal. Technology gives me fits from time to time.