Courtesy of Wally S., Wally’s Urban Market Garden, Saskatoon SK
Because many SPIN farms, including mine, just look like a really big garden, I often get asked the difference between a gardener and a backyard farmer. To turn your garden into a business, you need to grow a wide variety of crops, consistently, in significant volume, at commercial grade. In other words, you need product, and lots of it, for a long period of time.
SPIN farmers use the “week after week “strategy for many of their crops to achieve steady production of a crop throughout the entire season. With highly marketable crops that are considered to have short seasons, that takes some strategizing. Here is how a “week after week” cropping strategy works for a typically cool weather crop like spinach.
Early in the season when it is cool, I plant several staggered plantings of a common variety like Bloomsdale and Tyee. Because of my urban backyard microclimate, some of these plantings even overwinter here in zone 3, allowing me to get to market very early. I follow up with harvests from my early spring plantings to keep a steady offering of spinach going.
While I continue to harvest and sell my spring plantings of spinach, I get transplants going of New Zealand/Malabar spinach, which grows well in warm to hot conditions, and plant them out in late spring for a summer harvest, to sell once the early plantings of spinach are spent.
So a “week after week” spinach strategy would include several staggered early plantings of regular spinach, and then transplant-based production of alternate warm-weather types. Then later staggered summer plantings of regular spinach, which take me right into cooler fall like conditions. This way it is possible to have “spinach” most of your marketing weeks, including right through hot summers.
With the steady introduction of new and exotic varieties of crops by my seed company friends, there is an ever-increasing number of crops that can be used in this type of strategy. So consider this a warm-up for your 2016 planning, when all those seed catalogs start arriving.
