February 5, 2015

Good morning, Sorry for the delayed post. Our internet just came back around 12 noon..

Wellll what with all the moisture in January the garden has not really seen much of me. Some times it is good to cool ones “jets” and let gravity, breezes, and sunshine do their soil drying charm. Harvesting has been a bit of a challenge of late. At least Deb hasn't found me stuck up to my neck in mud......yet. This is the desert ...right? This too will change soon enough , so I embrace it with as much patience that I can muster.

Well any way I decided to right down how many vendors that we have at the market and list what items are sold. It really is an impressive list. I broke this master list into two lists. The regular as rain (by the way has been a bit so of late too) vendors and the ones I expect to see shortly as there is more warmth.

On the regular list there are usually around 20 vendors. The memory of just 3 or 4 vendors is still firmly in my memory. For the soon to return vendors there are an additional 9 vendors. Now for all the things we sell, it is an impressive list too. There are 30 different items with only a few items being repeated by vendors.

The thing that really surprised me, was the number of folks selling agriculture products. We are very close to where we could become a Texas Certified Farmers Market. This golden number is 51%.

Out of these 29 vendors there are 12 vendors selling agriculture products.. That puts us at 41%. Ten more points to go.

It would be nice to be a Farmers' Market in more than just name. This is not something that I am hung up about. If we did become certified as a Texas Farmers' Market, we would be placed on a list on the State farmers market web site. This is cool because someone wanting to come vacation in the Big Bend could find out about us before even getting here. Any advertising is good. I still dream of filling the courtyard with vendors and the spilling out on Murphy Street with eventually filling both east and west sides of 5^th street. This could happen!!

Becoming certified is on the wish list but growing the market is of greater importance. We welcome anyone to sell at market we like to keep it to items that are produced by yourself or a family member. There continues to be the rumor that everyone must pay a table fee. There is not. What we do request is that if you make $100 or more that you give a $10 donation to the market. This money goes toward, advertising, market improvements (like our wonderful shade structure), and monthly rent of the courtyard. So if you know of anyone that would like to join the market family have them call Mark or Deb at 432-837-0118.

And yes the garden is doing really nice, especially if we continue to get more sunshine and warmth. The cauliflower is starting to head along with the cabbages. The kohlrabi continues to bulb, they have been fairly irregular on sizing up. I am out of lettuce but a new transplants are looking good. Maybe a month out unless it warms a lot. New planting of carrots may be ready. Some green onions are looking pretty good and all of the newly transplanted onions have survived.

Because I have not been able to look under the fabric on a daily basis, I have found that under the covers some adversaries have been having a bit of a party. There were some caterpillars that devoured 70% of my spinach seedlings. Hand picking, cold pressed neem did not make a dent in them. I could not make a positive ID on them. To me they looked like they were caterpillars instead of grubs or maggots so out of a last resort I used some Bt. I am not seeing them anymore. Not the approach I like to take but it was the best info I had to work with. I will have spinach, just not as much as I would like. Saddly my second crop of broccoli rabb was hit by what I believe to be cut worms. I searched trough the soil and plants to no avail but it looks like the raab are too compromised. Such is organic agriculture. It has been a difficult year for several crops. I continue to evaluate what I did so that I can correct things for next year.