Courtesy of Adithya Ramachandran, Kaleidoscope Vegetable Gardens, Dundurn SK
Most farmers underperform at early spring markets. SPIN-Farming is based on generating strong cash flow early by targeting $1,000 weekly sales – in late April or early May – regardless of your growing zone. To do that you need to ignore conventional gardening practices, and get into production early, in volume. Adithya Ramachandran’s Kaleidoscope Vegetable Gardens, is in zone 3. Here is what he and his farming partner Jenny Menat went to market with May 7. Adi is using unheated high tunnels…and improving his production strategy all the time. Read below.
This spring has been an interesting learning experience. There are some things I would do different next year, including increasing my staggering time for radishes, and a greater focus on beets, green garlic and kohlrabi to target late spring sales. Something else that I would like to try out next spring is an early planting of broad beans for bean production. I noticed that the ones I seeded in March were flowering now. However I tilled them all under because they were planted densely for shoot production (I didn’t get around to harvesting them all), and they wouldn’t have done well.
I also plan to diversify my spring sales next year with tulips.
CONTINUE THIS DISCUSSION ON EARLY SPRING MARKETING AND PRODUCTION IN THE FORUM > > >
