Archives June 2007

For the love of Pete when I started this blog I was determined to make a post each day. That was my intention. But it has been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I need to be more people for sure!

To catch up. The farmers market at the Bay is going swimmingly. There were more vendors this past week than any week this season. Many vendors had local strawberry, rhubarb, beets, greens and what appeared to be trucked in vegetables from Syracuse. ( one of my pet peeves but this is not a perfect world so I let it go. )

I still do not have the full list of farmers markets posted on the site and I wished I had more time. Most of my spare time has been spent on the wedding site. I am in the middle of a total re-write and since we depend on the traffic for our lively hood the wedding seo comes first.

We are down to just a few flats of annual flowers. Some marigolds, dusty miller, verbena and some of the ivy that got nailed by frost. The ivy did not come back but the geraniums that were hit are now looking very good and selling well.

We are taking the larger 4 inch geraniums and potting them up into 1/2 gallons. This makes them look better and they sell better too. We use a little nutricote time release fertilizer on the transplants to keep them healthy.

Our target to be done with the annuals each year is July 4 and it looks like we will be able to make it.
We will keep selling herbs, baskets, geraniums, hosta and perennials for rest of the summer. This does not take as much time as doing the annuals and leaves us time to get the next seasons crop of perennials going. It is remarkable how well the perennials look after wintering over in the gallon pots.

This year we simply nested them together in raised beds and covered them with straw. This was a bad plan because the straw was full of seeds and it also made a good place for the voles to hide.
They ate a good number of plants by the root and chewed a lot of pots up.

This year we are going to bed them inside pine mulch so that each pot is entirely encapsulated, hopefully making it hard for the voles to move from one pot to the other. We will see how this works.

We finally made it to the Alex Bay farmers market last Friday and here is the Alex bay NY farmers market report. I say finally because we have been tied up the past 2 weekends and were not able to attend.

We sold perennials, annuals, hosta, hanging baskets bird feeders and herbs.
The new location is at the Kinny Drug parking lot but the set up is in the grass beside the parking lot in the margin adjacent to NYS Rt 12. This spot is better than the prior location, which was across Rt 12 at the information booth lot for the following reason:

1. People walking from the Bay do not need to cross 2 lanes of traffic and the market is closer to the village.
2. NO GEESE. Goose droppings made the other location messy.
3. There is a dock serving the St. Lawrence River and boaters can make it over from the islands.
4. Plenty of parking for customers and vendors, and the store has a place to keep the signs. Customers these days want to park where they can see their car and many of the customers are elderly and infirm. The handicap parking affords them the ability to park where they only need to walk a few yards.
5. More buyers from the busy drug store and bank shoppers. Vendors need to make sales and good sales insures quality vendors. As with a poorly run craft show you can always find vendors but the quality vendors will not return if there are no sales. They can just as easily sell else where. With out customers the show or market in this case would end up with vendors who have less to offer in the public. In that case the public will not continue to support the efforts and the customer attendance will drop off.

This is especially true of a small market with out a secondary draw such as the State Office Building at the Watertown Market.

6. Retained visibility and increased safety. The prior spot had traffic passing at high speed and there were numerous incidents and near misses. Here the traffic is just coming through a light and going much slower to begin with.

We has a good day selling and we were able to hand out more literature hopping we can coax more visitors to the greenhouse. We are hoping that investing the time to set up with help insure the markets success and pay off for us in advertising as well.

Every customer we asked thought this is a better location.

I will go out on a limb and predict this could be a very popular market attracting dozens of vendors and thousands of shoppers.

The mist today was driven by a 30 mph breeze and seemed to penetrate our skin and the cold did not help at all.
But this is NNY and this type of weather is to be expected in May and early June. As a matter of fact the temperature right now is threatening 40 degrees F. Needless to day we get a bit edgy when the mercury dips below 40 as most of our plants are out doors and it is wet and very windy.

A recent customer, who also works at a local garden center reported they lost a lot of vegetable plants early in May when the weather was so iffy. Some of our Regal Geraniums are just rebounding and the German ivy still does not look up to par, all from the same cold spell.

Our biggest problem right now is the grass which continues to grow even when the weather is too hot or too wet to mow. The gravely is still out of service so we do the “lets follow the push mower all over the place” routine. The whole thing start to finish takes about 2 hours but seems like much more. Come to think about it that’s a fairly long walk. At about 3 mph that would be 6 miles although some of it is backwards. Not sure if we should subtract the backwards part.

The gravely will do the whole thing in about 1 hour because it goes faster and has a wider swath. Problem is we removed the deck when we rebuilt the transmission and something did not get attached correctly when the deck went back on. The trans works great.

When we got the mower 3rd and 5th gears did not work. The problem was the gear selectors, or dogs as we transmission specialists call them, had worn surfaces but we solved that problem with new parts.

Transmissions are fascinating with all the gears and let me tell you some of them are razor sharp as I found out. We dumped all the parts into a vat of kerosene and cleaned them up. After some trial, and the peerless transmission book as a guide, we had the whole thing up and running with all gears functioning perfectly. But the mower deck continues to vex us.

Not for long thought as we now have room enough to bring the mower into the garage and make the adjustments. That is now that the porch window boxes are finished. Pictures to follow as soon as they are painted.

It seemed like the warm dry weather was going to go on for ever. The weather is finally turned to intermittent rain and that is good for the plants in the gardens and we have rain at last.

Plants in the ground need about 1 inch of rain each week or be supplemented with additional water. The trick is to get the water where it is needed with out wasting the excess.

How often have we seen a lawn sprinkler set up in the garden, broadcasting the water over the entire surface. Chances are a good deal of that water will not get to the plant roots being lost to evaporation. This is in part to geotropism which is the action where the roots of a plant want to grow toward the center of the earth as opposed to negative geotropism where the plant above the ground wants to grow away from the earth.

The point is the roots grow down so water on the ground between the plants may never reach the roots. A better way is to use a soaker hose along the plant rows so that the water is concentrated where it can filter down to the roots before it evaporates.

Another method is to pipe water directly to each plant and insure that every bit of water gets where it is needed. A side benefit to this method is that only the plants get the water and the weeds that might grow between may not get so much.

Of coarse with a rain fall of more than an inch of rain the whole area will be wetted evenly and everything grows including the weeds. And the up side to this is a wet garden is easy to weed. The unwanted plants will pull much easier than if the roots are dry. Its a muddy job but some one has to do it !

By the looks of things we are through with the main storm and today will be scattered t storms and it should be more pleasant to work in the gardens and yard now that the temperature and humidity are lower than in the past week. Not that warm weather isn’t welcome.