There is a reason that many growers market's don't start till June or July. There simply is not enough (or any) produce ready to be harvested from the garden at this time. You are all used to going to the grocery store and getting what ever you want whenever you want it. Seasonal vegetables are another story all together. Salad crops should be ready by the beginning of June, summer vegetables will be ready later this year - in the summer. Grocery store vegetables come from thousands of miles away. Salad crops are ariving from California and Florida this time of year. Summer crops are being shipped from South America, or Mexico. During the Winter here in the North it is Summer in the Southern hemisphere. Buying local entails being in touch with seasonal growth cycles and eating seasonaly while getting the stuff you need anyway from the usual grocery shelves. One's carbon footprint is greatly enlarged the more one buys stuff grown conventionally, and the further it is shipped to market. I must admit that I myself buy a lot of stuff in the winter, and other off seasons (like spring, for tomatoes, and etc.) Even though there will be salad crops ready in a month or so, there will be limited fair ready at that time. Throughout the year, the variety of produce being offered will increase steadily untill first frost. Some things will survive even the freezes we get, but when it begins to freeze there will not be much to offer untill late spring, early summer. Some growers have large green houses which can extend the season to 12 months. I have, not yet, put up a green house. I have been working at increasing the fertility of my soil so I can offer the best produce possible from my gardens to nourish us all, and all of our families. When I first began working the soil here in Los Chaves, I was obliged to use a mattock in some areas to even be able to turn the soil as a shovel would not penetrate it. (Mattock - industrial strength hoe, sort of like a cross between a hoe and a double bladed axe which is used with an overhead swing like the axe, with the blade across the handel like the hoe.) Now, I can (mostly) push a shovel into my soil without even having to stand up on the shovel to get it into the soil. The soil is, as they say, in good tilth; it is soft, friable, full of organic matter, moisture, and plant nutrients. Good stuff for growing crops. Since the native soil (what I started with) is sandy loam, most vegetables love it. I am plesed you want to start getting produce already (frankly, so do I) but, alas, we will have to wait. The harvest will commense in due time. We will all have to be patient a little while longer.

I tend to use Organic methods. The term Organic is owned by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The people who verify that a farm truly deserves to be called organic, and certified as such, are all employees of the USDA. It costs thousands of dollars annually to become, and to retain the designation of certified organic. Therefore, I will not be certified organic. THe USDA recognizes this problem of time and money necessary to become Certified Organic, and allows the smallest farms to be labeled organic without going through the expense of becoming certified. Certified growers frown on that practice however. Even though it cuts the expense, to retain the organic label an operation needs to have a department of organic certification to tend to all the paperwork and research necessary. One of the reasons for this is that any materiel used on the organic farm not labeled as certified organic must have each and every ingredient that makes up that materiel researched to discover if that ingredient is worthy of being labeled organic. If that is not the case, the whole bag of whatever the materiel is must not be used, or the farm looses the organic certification. (Think of a materiel like fertilizer, or a spray product, for instance.)

Ever since the USDA took over the organic certification program there has been a movement afoot which reinstates the original idea of "organic", in which growers oversee one another (as the original organic movement did) to verify that growers do, in fact, use organic methods. it is called Naturally Grown. I am working towards becoming Certified Naturally Grown (CNG). Since our soils need phosphorous and nitrogen, I have been using ammendments to provide these. I am researching a source for green sand (no green paint here - it is an ancient sea bed deposit rich in trace minerals, including a little phosphorous. Also, I will need to apply some colloidal- or rock-phosphate to enrich our soils with that mineral to meet the needs of our crops. These two ammendments will only need to be applied every four years or so, but are vitally important to the groth of our crops, especially to the development of the fruit (botanically speaking - peaches, yes, but also peppers and tomatoes as well as mellons and etc. Anything the seed is developed in.) Our soils are alkaline, different from, but related to being also very basic (as opposed to acidic). Super- or tripple-phosphate helps change this basic reaction more towards neutral. But so does soil sulpher. Sulpher is a naturally occurring mineral, and as such it is perfictly acceptable to use in a CNG program farm. CNG is catching on around the country and will, with a little education, become a respected label under which to market locally grown produce.