Week 39: The start of spring and of sales

The swallows have returned, the plum tree is blossoming and the evenings are noticeably warmer (less cold). Spring has begun. This year the start of September also signified the beginning of sales, another mini-milestone for us. I had (perhaps foolishly) decided that meant our website and social media pages should also be up and running. So a first version is up and running – and I’ll catch up on sleep this week! The process was helped along by the free consultation I had (thanks to the government) with a social media marketing consultant who was brilliant. It’s a lot less daunting now and I almost have a plan. More tangible – and possibly more important – tasks ahead of sales were assembling our new sink and conducting slug patrols every few nights to make sure that our lettuce were intact for Saturday. On Saturday morning we got up at the civilised time of 7:30 to harvest our lettuce and rainbow chard, wash it and drop it off at the shop. Then I tried to distract myself from wondering how sales were going. Alex played golf!

As a newbie to both market gardening and running a business it’s difficult to judge our first weekend. We didn’t sell everything even though we only had a fairly small amount. Our lettuce was an heirloom variety (Cimmaron) which I like but it isn’t as bright as a more common cos. Not many people knew there would be produce for sale partly because I didn’t advertise at all until Friday afternoon (out of nerves). And my advertising was only to my Facebook friends and anyone who stumbled across our social media pages. Now I will pay attention to good hashtags! But we’re really happy with the little shop we’re selling at and I think word of mouth will help over time. Perhaps a reasonable goal is selling out of four types of produce in the first week of October (which also a good goal for the growing side!).

The beginning of spring means we can really get busy sowing seeds. The number of plants on our most trusted planting guide has quadrupled to 33 this month. Recent weeks have reinforced how much temperature matters. The tomatoes have struggled since they left the heat mat – so much so that Alex agrees we can use that tunnel space for greens in the near term. Meanwhile Alex’s extra heat mats arrived and so of course he began putting all sorts of seedlings on them (the standard suite is tomatoes, eggplants, capsicum, chillies and cucumbers). In a few days he grew rocket seedlings that look a million times healthier than the ones we grew in the laundry a month ago. The same is true of the broccoli. Out of curiosity I walked around with soil thermometer on Saturday. There’s been a huge increase from a few weeks ago: the tunnel soil was 20 degrees and that was 5 degrees higher than outside. Even without a thermometer the difference is clear: the lettuce are larger every day. So it seems I don’t have to stare at them quite so hard ahead of next week’s harvest, at least not unless I’m looking for slugs!