Going to Farmers Market is interesting. I’m always late and never seem to have much to sell, but I like meeting with the other vendors and watching the people.
This week my garlic is ready to pull.
Every fall I shove garlic cloves into the ground, add mulch and wait. The leaves push their way out through the straw and stay green all winter.
Spring brings fast growth. Then the scapes or flower heads appear. Gardening books say to clip these off. They are good sliced and added to stir fry.
One of the vendors clued me in on the next step. I used to wait until the tops died down to pull the bulbs and had many of them split into cloves. He told me to pull the bulbs when the bottom couple of leaf sets turned yellow. This works great.
One of my difficulties taking produce like garlic and going to Farmers Market is pricing it. That is even more complicated now as prices soar in the store.
Another complication is dealing with people who believe vendors should charge much less than the store for their produce. Raising produce as a small gardener or farmer takes more work than large commercial operations.
There is one exception: tomatoes. Nothing tastes like a vine ripened tomato.
Store tomatoes are picked green so they will ship with minimum damage. Ethylene gas is a natural ripening agent, but it only makes a tomato appear red. The tomato is still green with little real flavor.
Our cool, wet April has made tomatoes late for Farmers Market. I am watching my green tomatoes get bigger with no touch of red on any of them.
Will my tomatoes join me going to Farmers Market? Probably not many will.
Tomatoes are one crop we will eat lots of. Extras will be frozen. The day before frost, the green ones will go into the pantry where many will turn red.
The same routine as the store uses? On the surface. My tomatoes will still taste a lot better.
The store doesn’t carry Speckled Roman, Pineapple, Bonnie’s Best or Boxcar Willie. These are tomatoes bred for flavor, not marketability.
In “Mistaken Promises” Hazel Whitmore raises pullets to show at the county fair. Her mother and grandfather compete with their tomatoes.
