I sowed two flats of peppers today, thereby officially starting the new garden season. A few days ago it really did feel like spring, though right now it definitely doesn’t. We’ve had quite a bit of snow in the last two days. But peppers need to be coddled inside for quite a while before they’re ready to face the real world — in a few months it will presumably be much too warm outside for me and just right for peppers.
The sad part is that we ate our last potatoes yesterday. Now I’m going to have to go back to buying second-rate potatoes — half of which will have been damaged during the mechanical harvesting process. To add insult to injury, I’ll have to pay around a dollar a pound for the miserable things. I think last I heard, farmers were getting about $7/cwt for potatoes. A more than 1300% markup from the farm gate to the retailer?! It’s the farmer that has to actually grow the things and deal with weather, pests, diseases, etc. As a former farm boy, I’m going to be seriously offended if anyone so much as suggests that the wholesalers and retailers who package the potatoes and have them sitting around for a while add more value to the product than the farmer who grew them. So my purchases of potatoes will come most grudgingly. As Erin can well attest.
And someday I will have a larger garden and a proper root cellar.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer