Back in the days before we had a kid and a bunch of blogs and had time on our hands, we spent a couple of years with a home garden big enough to sell produce at our local farmer's market. We specialized in hot peppers - habaneros, jalapenos, hot banana, cayenne, chiltepin, the list goes on - and cherry tomatoes, specifically Sweet 100s, which are like the candy of home fruit and vegetable gardening, and Yellow Peard, which have a lot of sweetness but also a delicious citrus edge. We also sold okra, but there wasn't much of a market for naturally-grown okra at that time.

At full tilt we were showing up with 30-40 pounds of cherry tomatoes in a 10-gallon storage container and selling them by the pint for $3 a pop. The farmer's market was struggling and we never sold more than 20 pounds or so, but between that and the other produce we would sometimes walk away with $100 or $150 for four hours of our time that were very rewarding. When you factor in all of the gardening time and expenses, of course, it never made financial sense.

Then came a child, and the immediate reduction and slow ramping back up of our gardening ambitions. At four, Z is actually a big help and a lot of fun to have in the garden, and takes pleasure in every part of gardening, except weeding (did you know some goatweed has thorns?). A few weeks ago, we visited the farmer's market to buy vegetables after a bit of an absence, and were surprised to see how much it had grown. The market was thriving, with twenty or thirty sellers and everything from fruit and vegetables to locally-roasted coffee, soaps, and handicrafts. The parking lot the market is held in was crowded with shoppers, too. As we recalled the pleasure we got from selling at the market during its slower days, and the fact that we had suddenly moved back into having more cherry tomatoes than we could eat or even had time to process and save, we realized that coming back to the farmer's market once or twice would be a lot of fun to do with Z.

So last weekend we got up early, made some green smoothies for breakfast, and packed ten pints of cherry tomatoes and four or five pints of green beans, grabbing her play table and chair on the way out the door. And for a $10 day selling fee, we helped Z set up shop.




She had a lot of fun and did a great job. It took almost two hours to sell all the stuff but between the conversation, the people-watching and the occasional forays to explore the rest of the market, she declined all offers to leave early, even as the sun broke out over the edge of the building we were next to and things started getting hot. We helped her count money and she made change. She drew pictures with markers to give each paying customer. She forced samples on people who had stopped idly to chat, and once they tasted, they bought. When you're selling garden-fresh cherry tomatoes, sampling is key, because they are 100x better than store-bought!

Z was determined to stay until we sold everything, which we almost did, except for a pint of green beans and half a pint of cherry toms left over from sampling, for a profit of $35 less our $10 fee.

As we were getting ready to leave Z discovered that the woman a couple stalls down from us was selling handmade dolls. They were very nice, but I initially rejected Z's pleas to let her spend her portion of our earnings on the doll. It was filled with organic millet, really nicely made, and priced at $10. My thought was that this would work against our goal of teaching her the value of the money she had earned. Plus, I am a cheapskate.

In the end, though, I realized that what she had really learned that day was the value of her work - that she could exchange her labor and something she had produced for something that was valuable to her. That concept in itself is a big deal for a kid to realize. She gets the concept of money, but allowing her to spend her portion of the money (we agreed to split it with her 50/50 - and we got a good bargain, as she was the key to all our sales) was far more instructive in cementing in her mind just what she had accomplished.

Plus, the woman refused to take the stated $10 price of the doll, and gave her $4.25 back (all the change she had). In turn we gave her the leftover half pint of cherry tomatoes and a pint of green beans. My spendthrift heart soared.


And Z was proud to have worked to earn the money for a new, beloved baby.


By the way, that guy at the table next to Z's in the top picture? A honey man. And we're getting bees!

We've been getting a lot of tomatoes in the last couple of weeks, but the real explosion has been in the cherry varieties - a couple dozen plants have offered up maybe 30-40 pounds of tomatoes so far.


It takes several pints of cherry tomatoes to make a quart of dried ones, but they taste delicious.


We use a Nesco Gardenmaster food dehydrator, currently on sale for almost 30% off (about $100 instead of $150) on Amazon. We've used it on and off for years and haven't had any trouble with it. The dehydrator features rigid tray sections topped with flexible polypropylene discs (mesh or solid, depending on what you're drying) that are easy to wash and BPA-free.


The drying process took around 24 hours at 135 degrees, but that was only background noise and occasional tasty checks of the tomatoes' progress. The real time-consuming tasks were washing and splitting the tomatoes and flipping them all on their trays halfway through; despite several clever ideas, there proved to be no quicker way to do this than to gently pick them up one by one and flip them over.

The dried tomatoes are not perfectly "preserved" in that they keep best and longest in the freezer, not on the pantry shelf. You can also preserve these dried tomatoes in olive oil, although it's recommended that you eat any stored that way within a few weeks, sort of a tomato equivalent to refrigerator pickles. I plan to do this with a small subset of these dried cherry tomatoes because I'm sure they will be delicious tossed in a pasta salad or topping a garden salad with spinach and goat cheese.

Last night we processed about 10 pounds of gorgeous whole, "full-sized" tomatoes - deep yellow ones (I'm blanking on the variety name) and lots and lots of Romas. Getting the skins off was easier than I anticipated; a pot of boiling water, a couple-minute dunk, and then dropping them in an ice-water bath to cool, and my four-year-old daughter Z and I peeled the skins off easily. I chopped off the stem end and in some cases pulled out a tougher central pillar while we both peeled them; then all it took for the sauce was simmering and seasoning. It wasn't enough to can, and we're a little wary of our skills at canning low-acid foods anyway. And of course there's the whole BPA thing. We'll freeze the gallon or so of tomato sauce to save it until winter.

Are you harvesting a bumper crop of anything, or planning on one? If so, what are you doing with it? We'll share a few other ways we're making use of our tomatoes in upcoming posts!

I took a tour of the backyard with my toddler son on a cool Saturday morning and found that, as I had suspected, spring is here. Some of my garlic sprouts are an inch or two above the soil, a few of my earliest varieties of crocuses are blooming (the deep violet ones are always first), the tulip leaves are starting to unfurl gracefully, and the early native perennials (like lupine, delphinium, and flax) are sending up their first few leaves.


Garlic sprouts on a foggy morning

All these things point to a need for me to get organized and start working. When starting the season, the first thing I always do is sit down on the couch with my husband and re-hash the previous year. He likes knowing that his opinion is important when it comes to gardening, because he's in charge of the most backbreaking aspects (like digging potato holes). He sometimes says surprising things, like "Can we plant more lettuce this year?" and so I write down 'add 1 more row of lettuce.' He makes some statements every year, and like his constant "I want bigger tomatoes" statement. I know, dear, I want bigger ones too, but you gotta remember we live in Montana and do not have a greenhouse.

Now that you know how my marriage and gardening life come together, here's a quick reminder of what you might get started on right now.

Do the gardening talk with your gardening partner, if you have one. Make sure to cover these topics:

• mistakes (perceived or real) in type and quantity of what you planted last year. Were these mistakes fixable, or were they just you learning about your climate, soils, time constraints, etc?


• Additions ("I want more lettuce") or subtractions ("do we really need a four foot row of dill?") from last year


• Infrastructure changes: New watering system? Thinking about raised beds?


• Budget concerns, especially if you are considering major overhauls like raised beds or yards of new soil

Create a list of everything you want to grow. Organize it by:

• Seeds you already have (most are good in the packet for 3 or 4 years, if kept cool and dry)


• Seeds you need to buy


• Starts that you can realistically do from home with some seeds and a sunny window


• Starts that you need to buy from a garden store or farmer's market

Start collecting reused containers for your starts, poking several large holes in the bottom of each for drainage. Both smaller (8 oz.) containers (good for smaller starts like lettuce and basil) and larger ones (for tomatoes, etc.) are great.

So far, in my house, we've come to a few key agreements for the '09 gardening season. For one thing, our new 40' x 10' garden, which has been slumbering for a year under a murderous layer of black weed smothering plastic, needs to be fenced to keep out the dog and chickens. This huge (about threefold) increase in gardening space will largely be taken up with low maintenance, high yield favorites like zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and potatoes. That sort of crop selection will keep the increase in workload down to a minimum. We've also agreed that we need to be more aggressive in our mulching strategies for the veggies - the best yields last year were in the parts of the garden that had a weed cloth and hay mix used for weed smothering.


The new garden, as partially exposed and seen from above

So now that you have your to-do list, go for it! We'll be gearing up in the next week or so with a lot of tips for growing all kinds of veggies, basic garden tasks, and more here on Gardenaut, so don't be intimidated - if you've wanted to start a small home garden, dive in and we'll be with you every step of the way.