Farmers' Market Starts and Other Issues

Today is our first market of the season. I feel like I should be a bit nervous and running around getting things together but other than harvesting crops, I think we are pretty much ready to go. And I should be out harvesting as it is dawn but we are having a thundershower so I will wait until the rain passes.

Picked up my new digital camera yesterday and of course I cannot use it because I am not running a new enough version of mac OS X. I have 10.2 and I need at least 10.3 to use the software that came with the camera so I can download the images to my hardrive via a USB cable. Not a huge problem as I have a 1 gig memory card on order form Amazon that should arrive in a couple of days and I will go to a local electronics box store to see if they have a card reader that is affordable (I suspect it will cost much less than buying the upgrade to Mac OS 10.3 which is around $100 US.). Despite the hardware/software incompatibility problems the camera is way cool and can do so much more than the old one.

After getting the camera and spending a couple of hours figuring out I cannot download pix to my Mac I went and started our tomato crop for the year. We are doing 11 different kinds of tomatoes: Glick's Pride, Big Beef, Pink Brandywine, Yellow Pear, Red Pear, Sungold, Yellow Taxi, Dr. Wyche's Yellow, Green Grape, Opalka and a Opalka cross we have been growing out for 3 years now trying to get one of the mutations to stablize out. We are going for the stripe genetics in hopes of creating a new striped sauce tomato. Should know something in maybe the next 4 to 7 years.

I started the tomatoes in small soil blocks and as soon as they germinate I will make 10 to 12 trays of 2" soil blocks and will move them into those. They are slated to be transplanted around June first and I do not want huge plants because they are quite hard to put into cloth mulches so that is why I started them so late in the season.