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  • From: "Beth Spaugh" <lists AT rhomestead.com>
  • To: "'Market Farming'" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] Variety observations
  • Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:50:01 -0400

Is it time while we are still looking at plants, harvesting, and marketing, to share experiences with varieties?
 
Tomatoes:
    Speckled Roman is eye-catching, attractive, fat, juicy and sells very well. 
    Juliet is rock solid disease resistant and produces well. Having trouble selling it.
    Garden Peach selling well and growing well. I would not use hoophouse space on it again because the outside plants are doing very well.
    Orange Blossom is a wonderful tomato and sells well, but it seems very susceptible to every disease under the sun.  Short season or multiple plantings. The fruits can be cosmetically beautiful, but also can have lots of spots and cracks.
    Grafted a few heirlooms on Maxifort.  The fruit of the grafted Striped German and Cherokee Purple are much nicer than the ungrafted fruit.  They don't have nearly as much stem scar area.  Plants and yield, all in the hoophouse, look similar grafted and ungrafted.
    Polbig and Mountain Princess outside fruit is cosmetically good, and they are producing very well.
    Pineapple fruits seem nicer looking than Striped German.
 
Squash:
    I have used and like the powdery mildew resistant Success.  It is a small squash fruit though - takes a lot of squash to make a pound.  I also tried SlikPik this year and will change to SlikPik.  The SlikPik fruits are much larger. My CSA likes volume. Market customers also seem more drawn to the longer SlikPik.  I think Success is still a great squash, maybe better for home gardens or someone with an upscale restaurant clientele.
    Zephyr plants are holding up extremely well.  The small Zephyrs are a hard sell for me though.
    Costata Romanesco is holding up much much better than the hybrid zucchinis did. Standard zukes succumb to cuke beetles, squash bugs, viruses pretty quickly on my farm.
 
Cukes:
    Straight Eight is doing wonderfully.  Other new one that held up well until two days ago when it changed from healthy green to covered with powdery mildew overnight is the heirloom Boothby Blonde. Still a little hard sell of the yellow cuke, but has lots of potential and will be a repeat next year.
 
Well, this was my unwind from market. Need to go spray bT.
 
Beth Spaugh
Rehoboth Homestead, Peru, NY
Farm Fresh Food Club CSA - http://rhomestead.com 
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Garden fresh vegetables, organically grown, and pastured chicken, duck, and geese
 
"How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." - Wendell Berry
 
"Without power over our food, any notion of democracy is empty." - Frances Moore Lappe
 



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