Market Farming

["wiediger" <wiediger AT msn.com>]

Phil,

 

Sorry to have taken so long to respond to your question.  It's been a busy week here at the farm.

 

We live in SC KY, zone 6b with a last killing frost date of somewhere between April 20 th - May 5, depending on what one reads.  We've seen it on both dates.  So we usually plant field tomatoes the week of April 20th (23 +/-) and peppers go in around the end of the first week in May.

 

We start our hoophouse tomatoes and peppers January 15th and plant tomatoes in the hoophouses on March 15 and peppers go in April 1.  Most years we start picking ripe tomatoes by the 3rd week in May.  With the cool, gray days of May this year, yields were a bit later, with a first really good harvest coming the first week of June. We plan on harvesting them out of the hoophouses until our field grown tomatoes and peppers ripen.  This year we will follow them with cantaloupes for a late harvest (and higher prices).  The name of the game is to have produce when others don't.  Early or late seems to command a premium price..

 

We also find that the market for winter greens is unbelievable.  We started with 1 - 20x60 hoophouse and now have 6500 sq feet of hoophouses with the demand for winter produce exceeding production at times.  We have also experimented with late fall tomatoes in the frames.  We can get a really nice price for vine ripe tomatoes at Thanksgiving time.  In 1999, we harvested our last vine ripen tomatoes on Dec 21. ( Overnight temperature of 18 took them out that evening).

 

We're hosting a workshop on passive solar greenhouse (hoophouse) growing on October 20th.  If you are interested in more information, visit our website at the address below.

 

Paul Wiediger
Au Naturel Farm
http://aunaturelfarm.homestead.com

----- Original Message -----

From: HackettShark AT aol.com

To: Market Farming

Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 7:40 AM

Subject: [market-farming] Re: peppers

We are zone 4 here and have been seriously thinking about putting up more
hoophouses for the winter to grow greens in for the winter sales, the demand
is real high and very few people doing it.  When do you have to plant
tomatoes and peppers to get them to the market this early.  My field tomatoes
will not be ready for at least another month to 6 weeks.

Phil