There's Still Time to Plant

The success of the fall garden depends on two key factors:
Getting those cool-loving plants to germinate and grow during the hot days of late summer;
Protecting them from occasional light frosts in fall for a long season of harvest.

In the February issue of GFM I wrote about starting peppers in a greenhouse or hoophouse, In this article, I’ll cover other important aspects of growing in protected culture, including pruning, pest and disease control, and harvest.

In this second of two articles looking at less popular but lucrative greenhouse/hoophouse crops, we will look at the particularities of growing peppers in protected culture. As I mentioned in last month’s article about growing greenhouse eggplant, if you have grown greenhouse tomatoes, many of the techniques you already know can be applied to this solanaceous crop. There are just a few differing techniques that can help you get the most out of your greenhouse pepper crop.

Let’s talk about all the great reasons to cut parts off of vining, fruiting hoophouse crops. In this article, we’ll look at leaf and cluster pruning as applied to tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and peppers. Tomatoes tend to be the most management intensive of the four crops, so in most cases I will talk about the procedure on tomatoes and say how it varies for the other crops.

One of the best reasons to grow tomatoes in a hoophouse or greenhouse is to improve fruit quality. There are a lot of ways that fruit quality can be improved just by going under cover. You can keep off rain, which can cause checking or spots. You can keep the foliage dry, wet foliage being one of the necessary conditions for many of the worst tomato diseases (late blight, I’m looking in your direction). But controlling the amount of water the plant gets is an easy way to improve fruit quality.

As the snow falls here in Maine and I look back through my records for last year, I realize that somehow or another, I ended up having a good hoophouse year in 2012.  In fact, I doubled my tomato yield from the previous year in the same size house. In 2011, I grew just over 2,000 pounds of tomatoes in my 30 x 48 foot hoophouse. In 2012, I grew just over 4,000 pounds. I’d like to share some of my hoophouse successes and failures from 2012 in the hope that I can pass on something useful for 2013. This is the first in a series of articles about hoophouse improvements, and will cover planting density and trellising methods.

Almost everyone wants tomatoes! The range of colors, shapes and flavors is enormous. The taste of a fresh-from-the-vine, unsprayed tomato is infinitely better than that of a tired, much-traveled industrial tomato. Although this crop practically sells itself, it might not be easy money: tomato production can be labor-intensive — 350 hours per acre — and then there is a range of pests and diseases to avoid.

With an unheated hoophouse or Quick Hoops™ covered with greenhouse poly, you can have fresh produce to sell until Thanksgiving and beyond.

In the April issue of Growing for Market, we published an excerpt from Eliot Coleman’s new book, The Winter Harvest Handbook, in which he promotes low tunnels as an inexpensive alternative to high tunnels/hoophouses. Coleman says that high tunnels make sense for the crops that you have to tend to or harvest during the winter, such as greens, leeks and carrots. But for those that will be planted in fall and then left alone until spring, low tunnels are much more economical -- 5 percent of the cost of the same area under high tunnel.

Eliot Coleman's new book, The Winter Harvest Handbook, proves that he continues to experiment and innovate - and that he is meeting with considerable success, with gross revenue of $80,000 per acre on his coastal Maine farm.

Autumn can be a profitable season for local growers, but it requires a lot of planning far in advance to get a good crop mix in sufficient volume. Many of the best fall crops — think pumpkins and Brussels sprouts — take more than 100 days to mature. That means spring is the time to analyze potential markets, schedule plantings, and order seeds. In this issue of the JSS Advantage, we’ll suggest crops that will keep you selling at least until Thanksgiving.

At our farm, where the average first frost date is October 14, the first half of August is our last chance to sow several vegetables to harvest before winter. Depending on your climate zone, your dates might need to be earlier or later than ours. Planning and timing are crucial – if germination fails, you may not get a second chance.

August can be a busy month. Summer crops are at their peak and fall crops need attention. It's time to look ahead to fall and winter markets. Yet, it may still be so hot you just don't want to do anything!  We'll suggest some practical ideas and, we hope, provide some encouragement to keep you going.

 

In most of the United States, mid-summer is the time to schedule fall crops, including those you will harvest this fall and winter and those you will plant in fall for early spring harvest.

Almost everyone loves strawberries, especially locally grown, organic ones. They are a good market crop because of thedivine flavor, and they are the earliest fruit. Traditional home-gardening methods of strawberry-growing are too labor-intensive for a commercial scale. Standard commercial methods involve black plastic mulch and growing the plants for one season only. What’s an ecologically-minded small-scale grower who wants to earn a decent living to do?