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This was our first year selling at market and I'd be interested in hearing from other newbies about the mistakes you felt you made this year. I'm a firm believer in that we learn more from our mistakes than from our failures so I'd like to hear what you felt you did wrong and how you might change things for next year. Maybe some of the older salts here can provide some advice.
Our big ones:
1-Not planning plantings correctly. We have about 1 month to go before our market ends for the season but we are effectively out of stuff to sell. Heirloom tomatoes were our niche and most of our plants have petered out. We did plant some suckers later in the year and they are healthy and have fruit but it probably won't be ripe until after market is over.
2-Planting some varieties that were not well suited to market. We planted a variety of Cherry tomato named Koralik that while tasty and beautiful was absolute pain to pick in any quantities without damaging a large percentage of them.
3-Not enough variety in veggies. This can be traced directly to my disasterous attempt at french intensive gardening.
4-Overall poor planning and inexperienced farming procedures. This was a big one and can be directly attributable to our "newbieness" I think that there is a totally different mindset that you have to have when growing for oneself and growing for market. One of the biggest errors we made was in the choice we made to support our tomatoes. I read about a trellis in a book that seemed like a good idea. It consisted of 2 posts and a crossbeam at the top. The crossbeam had nails spaced at 2 feet apart. One end of the twine was attached to the nail and the other endwas tied to a stake that driven into the ground. Worked fine while the plants were young. But once those suckers got heavy with fruit, the vines snapped. And we had a ton of work after any storm that had wind
5-Poor harvesting practices. We tried to leave everything on the vine until the day before market but we found that by doing so, fruit would burst or get overripe. Our market is Saturdays only.
6-No plan for imperfect excess fruit. Most of it got made into sauce or canned for our personal use. Some of it made it back to the compost pile but we probably could have made additional money through making salsa's etc.
7- Poor record-keeping. We didn't keep track of what we were selling. We knew what our gross recepits were but I could only tell you from gut what our best sellers were etc. I also couldn't tell you what the ratio of what we sold vs. what we picked.
We still think that we had a good year and have definitely caught the bug.
Please chime in.
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