Spring, 2008 to Midsummer, 2009 Steve and Annie continue their market gardening adventure

This was how the market garden was presented to the public last summer. They reached over the fence, opened the white stryo box, took what they wanted, left money in the box (honour box). That year it quickly grew to needing two or three such boxes.

When I build my home here I had no thought of Annie being part of my life; and Annie doesn’t know how to live without having her own business. Never did. So this year we build a “dunny” or school-bus shelter structure and put into it a pair of recycled refrigerators. We cut a gate in the fence and named our market garden “The Back Gate.” In early December, 2008 the fridges became operational. I made up 20 mailbox stuffers about The Back Gate, of which only 12 were actually stuffed. That was the extent of our promotion; it was more than sufficient. We can not satisfy the demand

Early every morning Anne starts picking, washing, trimming and packing, so that by 9:30 or so the fridges are full. And by afternoon they are usually almost empty. The only thing that saves us from a life of unending toil is that we have a policy to sell only what is actually produced on our property. Since we have barely a quarter-acre in production, we can manage. Our veggies have received much praise from our customers— especially their flavour. A combination of properly balanced soil made through the use of Complete Organic Fertilizer plus FRESHNESS plus the fact that I have behind me many years of having done variety trials, which means that the varieties we choose are ones that are genetically tasty in the first place. Oh, our prices? About what they would pay in the supermarket.

No. 6 Garden (the address of our quarter-acre building block). Photos here taken spring, 2008.

We call this garden “No. 8 Garden” because the house address is No. 8. Note from the smaller photo taken a year ago that I have improved the bean trellis design from “rustic” to “lean-and-modern”. The trellis provides good privacy for the loungeroom much of the year and from within, an interesting view, as though there were a jungle immediately outside the window. The back row of the trellis grows Sugar Snap peas, and this crop is the tallest Sugar Snaps I’ve ever grown, probably because of the warmer and wind-protected microclimate along the sun-facing wall of the house. When the peas finished (about Christmas) the back side of the structure was planted to Musica, which will begin bearing late in February and continue into April, protected from frost by being next to the house. You can see the early sowing of Musicas have climbed about half-way up the front side.We grow Musica beans, a variety that has disappeared from the seed trade. Musica has flat, thin, tender, wide pods (Romano type) of quality so high that a local restaurant buys all the extras we can grow—if the neighbours don’t buy them all from the Back Gate. We’ll make quite a few hundred dollars from this privacy screen. The small photo below reminds you of what was there last year.