Eye on the Future: growing our food

Article on what you might expect from planning a small market garden offers up this advice:

II. Creating Your Own Successful Market Garden
How do you prepare?
1. START SMALL! Don't plant more than you can care for properly, and sell or use.
2. Determine the market or markets you will sell to: a) Wholesalers, b) small grocery stores, c) restaurants, d) farmers' markets, e) roadside stand, or f) home delivery.
3. Learn what vegetables you should grow by determining those that: a) sell well, b) at a good price, c) that you can grow readily.
4. Build proper facilities including a) a seedling greenhouse with tables, b) T-Frames and c) a good watering system. These are essential for success at this level.
5. Set up a formal accounting system, including account names and numbers for every category of asset, liability, equity, income, and expense. Get help from your CPA.
6. Stock up on tools, seeds, and fertilizers, and be sure to include all those costs, as well as your labor, in figuring your market prices.

You'll have to meet or beat your competition's prices to sell your produce at
the beginning. However, by growing more, bigger, fresher, tastier, and healthier produce than others, you will develop a loyal customer base, and then you can adjust your prices as needed.

People around here often have little road side stands with assorted veggies, and sometimes honey. They sometimes man the stand but usually you find a "self serve, self checkout" with a little jar for the money. I'm a city girl and just don't have that kind of trust in people.... but it seems to work fine so far- the region is changing though. I'm thinking that developing the loyal customer base is the key of success in building your own business of this type. Joanne may be able to write some advice as her own market garden has been in the works.

Having been down South on visits, I'd observe that it is tougher to grow things down there is some ways- Ohio has much more fertile soils and more dependable rainfall. But every place benefits from the ingenious human husbandry: "where there is a will there is a way" as the saying goes.

Wendell Berry said once in an interview: "Farming is a hard life. It's a hard life, therefore nobody ought to live it. What a remarkable conclusion! There are several steps that are left out. What causes the difficulty? Does freedom come out of it? Does family pride come with it, family coherence? Does some kind of idea of community come with it? Some kind of idea of stewardship, does that come with it? Do ideas of affection or love or loyalty or fidelity come with it?"

Beauty, respect, freedom, stewardship, fidelity, family, community, all are casualties of a mechanism that selects only for cheapness and a narrowly measured efficiency. Not for a melting bond with the land. Or farmers who farm because they love it. Or farms that have not been reduced to the mechanized, chemicalized production of a single crop as if they were widget factories.

Here's the good news. A whole new food system, one that uses dollars but is not ruled by them, is growing so fast that no one can keep track of it. You won't find its produce at your big-chain supermarket. You'll find it at your local farmers market, consumer coop, or CSA farm. Here a new economics is being practiced, economics, as if, as E.F. Schumacher once said, people mattered. As if the land mattered. As if food were more than a commodity. -Sustainability Institute

Well, I do have the green house, now, but need to recap my early vegetable garden success in production. Beginners Luck :) Now I need Oldtimer's Knowhow to kick in.
Here's a pic of the new greenhouse: