Gearing Up for the 2010 Vegetable Sale

Dec. 20, 2009: It’s time again to plan and gear up for the ‘Annual’ Vegetable Sale which will be held on March 13 ^th in conjunction with our Fort Bend County Master Gardener’s Perennial Sale.

Time to order the seeds for the Vegetable Sale. After reading seed catalogs, checking online seed vendors and researching information to find the best varieties for our area it was decided to keep several of the varietes from last year’s sale and add different varieties rather than use the exact list from the previous sale. Input from Master Gardeners and customers who bought plants at the sale last year or requested specific varieties was a factor in deciding which seeds to purchase.

The seeds were finally ordered from 5 vendors. Two of the vendors were used last year and three new ones were added, all of these were recommended by other MG groups or Urban Harvest. We ordered seeds for 10 varieties of tomatoes, 4 of eggplant, 5 varieties of peppers, 2 of tomatillos, 3 varieties of basil, and 1 of fennel.

It was decided to order fewer varieties of tomatoes (last year we grew 13, which included 2 free varieties from the vendors.)

Check back weekly for more updates.

Dec.21, 2009:Before the seeds arrive it time to get the paper work in order. Last year we developed several docs that would help us keep track of the planting schedule. Since we have limited space in the mist tent we must be sure that we don’t plant too many seeds at once or we’ll run out of space for the trays.

After much revising and counting dates and referring to Vegetable charts for germination, transplant, and maturity time we finally think the schedule is set. Of course this is probably going to be revised when reality kicks in. The spreadsheet has been developed and saved, we’ll print a copy to give to the volunteers who are part of the team.

Last year we had documentation sheets for each table in the greenhouse to record observations and actions taken each visit to the greenhouse. The results gave us invaluable data to apply to this year’s project. The new sheets are ready for printing.

We are now ready for the Kick-off meeting!

Dec 29, 2009: All of the seeds have arrived. So much for reducing the number of varieites. (LOL) We have ended up with 12 varieites (2 of which again are free packets from the vendors.) So we’ll still have a lot of tomato plants to sell.

This entry was posted on 15 January 2010 at 08:54 and is filed under vegetables. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.