SELLMEYER FARM NEWSLETTER

We had our first indoor winter market today. It was nice to be indoors, but the carting of everything indoors and the cramped space is always a trade off...! I don't know why it is but it's hard to get the customer to follow and continue to the indoor location. No matter how much we tell them that we are continuing all winter they just don't follow us over the winter, but this is the fourth year and it has grown considerably each year, it just takes time to build it up and to educate the customer!

We have all our sweet potatoes dug. We estimate between 8 and 9 thousand pounds is what we have! So we will have plenty to sell for the winter. We are looking at selling some to a local grocery store, so hope that goes well so they continue to buy more from us!!!! We've been digging a little ginger and tumeric each week for the market. That has gone very well, but will have to dig it all before long, as we've had our killing frost last week. All the outdoor tomatoes, okra, zucchini, and winter squash was killed. We still have tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, plus our tumeric and ginger in the hoop houses. We are also covering them with row covers to help prolong them, but they will not last too much longer. We did pull 10 dozen bunches of radishes that are outside. This is a good time of year for them, they are very sweet and crisp! Also still have parsley outside.  Have been dehydrating peppers and tomatoes. Will be putting together soup mixes this next week hopefully!

We are working on converting an old brooder house into a cooler as our current cooler is not big enough to hold all our sweet potatoes! We are adding more insulation and cooling/heating system, then we can transfer the rest of the sweet potatoes and winter squash into it. We've moved some of the potatoes to our old cooler and the rest are still in the green house curing... Then when we get that all done and things moved we get to start on cleaning up the fields, removing tomato stakes, strings and plastic mulch and drip tape so we can get them plowed, then we'll need to get the hoop houses cleaned out and replanted with some greens...always something to do, never a dull minute...!:) Plus all the seed catalogs are starting to come so we will need to get our orders placed for next year before too long...!!!!!! What would we ever do if we didn't have anything to do????????? Maybe sleep!!!!! :)