Marketing Ideas for a Bumper Crop of Cantaloupes

11 years ago

Greetings,

I only plant melons for the CSA and typically aim for every two week harvest with one melon per member share. However this year I have a massive crop of cantaloupes, the biggest I have every seen. Even if I give every member two melons a week I am still going to be having 10-15 extra a week.

The restaraunt and caterers aren't interested, and I can only sell what is listed on my contract at the Farmer's Markets I attend, and melons aren't listed. Any ideas? The only thing I am coming up with is a stand on the honor system.

I have never seen this level of production on melons before, I grow Sarah's Choice. I have been harvesting for two weeks now, and the plants are still putting on melons. I have one plant that has 21 melons on it, in various stages, and it is still flowering?

Thanks

Comments (11)

lazy_gardens
11 years ago
Try Craigslist ...
jrslick (North Central Kansas, Zone 5B)
11 years ago
You are the second person I have heard of, in the last two days, who says they have a market contract and can only sell what is on their contract. The other person said that only certain people can bring certain things. They have 2 or 3 people who can sell tomatoes, several sell melons and etc.

If it were me, I would walk away from a market like that. It is like a monopoly and IMO bad for the consumers. What if the person that sells tomatoes are really bad and don't taste good? What if mine taste much better, the customers never get to try them. What about a crop failure, hailstorm? If you allowed everyone to sell what they want, then the customers will talk and the person with the best stuff will get more business and the poorer tomato person will sell less. Why restrict your customers options?

Just wondering.

About selling cantaloupes, why not offer them to your CSA customers for additional charge. I know some families who would eat 3 to 5 melons a week, during the season.

Jay
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From years of experience at letting squash get too dry during the dog days of summer, I find it hard to imagine that letting one get too dry once or twice would kill a plant that quickly. When my squash plants get too dry, they might wilt and have a leaf yellow and look kind of pathetic but I've never seen them get so dry that they died quickly without me having a chance to try to save them. I am not saying it cannot happen, just that when they are grown in the ground, I never see that happen. Last year my plants in the ground went a month with no irrigation and maybe a quarter-inch or half-inch of rainfall and they didn't die. However, yours are in containers, so it is hard to say how long they could handle being too dry. The plants in the ground can stretch their roots and search for water. The plants in containers can not since they are limited to the soil-less mix in the container.. As a long-time gardener, I am sure you know that every plant has a certain wilt point beyond which it can not recover, so if yours reached that wilt point before you discovered the plant was too dry and watered it, then being too dry could have killed it. I still think it is a pest or disease problem. There are so very many diseases that will get them, and often it is bacterial wilt which is vectored by insects. If the plant is dead, you can slice open the stem to look for any evidence of SVBs. When I lose a squash plant to a disease, it is almost always bacterial wilt. When I lose one to disease, it is always SVBs, not squash bugs. Your mileage may vary. You can do whatever you wish to your squash stems, and the SVBs will find a way around it, sooner or later, in 99.9999% of the cases. They are that good at what they do. They have to be, since it is all about survival for them. I don't care what you wrap them in, what you bury stems under, etc. there is no way that you can give the squash plants 100% protection from SVBs in our climate, short of raising them in a high tunnel or under floating row covers. Even when you do that, you have to take extraordinary precautions to keep the SVBs out of the high tunnel or to exclude them from the low tunnels. There's too many SVBs, our season for them is very long, and they are remarkably good at seeking out, finding and destroying squash plants. I have been able to keep squash plants alive until August some years by wrapping stems, but other years they hit the plants around the third week of June and the wrapped stem does not deter them since they just enter the main stem higher up where it is not wrapped or the egg is laid on a leaf and the tiny cats tunnel into the stem right where the leaf petiole attachs to the stem. Bacterial wilt and squash wilt seem like they hit like a bolt from the blue, but if you observe your plants carefully, day in and day out, you sometimes realize that the plant had started to discolor slightly and look a little less happy a week or two before it wilted, browned and died. Sometimes you only realize that in hindsight, but other times you say it happening right in front of your eyes, and you sigh and shrug and say "oh well" because you know it has BW and you know it is just a matter of time before the plant dies. From infection to death might take as long as 2 weeks. Squash plants are susceptible to other diseases too including fusarium wilt, verticillium wilt and phytopthora root rot. My theory is that this is why seed packets contain 20 or 30 or more seeds--so you can be raising replacement plants all along as you're waiting for disease or SVBs to kill the current ones. Most summer squash plants don't live long enough to die of old age. For anyone reading this who wonders how commercial growers raise squash successfully while we home gardeners have so much trouble with squash bugs, SVBs and diseases, they have access to all kinds of heavy-duty fungicides and pesticides that are not available to home gardeners, and often those are systemic which is why they work so well. Dawn
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myfamilysfarm
11 years ago
I've sold 200 in one day at a farmers market. Yes craigslist is an option. I sold 75 lbs of tomatoes to one person. You could give the extra to the food bank, instead of them going bad. Also, cows like them, if you have them.

Believe me, the best thing our kids have done was bringing cows/calves onto the farm. Great garbage disposals, within limit. Certain things they can't have, but most of our stuff that doesn't sell goes to them. When one gets out, we tease them back into the fence with tomatoes, watermelons or whatever we have extra. Produce makes some of the leanest beef that you can get. Actually too lean for some people, they have actually complained about being too lean.

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Slimy_Okra
11 years ago
I agree with Jay (although from a practical point of view, sometimes vendors are powerless to do anything if there is only one major farmers' market in the area). The whole concept of a farmers' market is defeated when management insists on one or very few vendors producing an item. If customers wanted that sort of thing, they would go to the supermarket. We have that at my market (although it's not explicitly stated, it's there alright) and I find it sad, really, because the farmers' market then becomes a glorified shopping mall.

Can you try modifying the contract by adding cantaloupes?

Do you know any local ice cream producers, bakers, etc who would be interested in producing a value-added product of cantaloupe ice cream or cakes or pies?
Mark
11 years ago
Congrats on your bumper crop!
When I have more melons than my farmers market stand can handle I start calling B&B's in the area. They usually don't want to buy my other produce as they use very little, but they will usually take 10-20 melons a week.
Good luck.
boulderbelt
11 years ago
Make jam and distribute that to your CSA. I did that last year and my member LOVED it
myfamilysfarm
11 years ago
Ever try pickled cantalope, it's good.
2ajsmama
11 years ago
Ball Complete has a recipe for pickled cantaloupe. I couldn't find a recipe from Ball or on NCHFP for any kind of melon jam (though Ball Complete also has a watermelon jelly recipe - with 1/2C of vinegar). You have to be careful since melons are low-acid (pH around 6).

Boulderbelt, what was the source of your recipe? I did find one on UC Davis site for Peach-Cantaloupe jam but peaches are high-acid and it's half peach half cantaloupe.

Here is a link that might be useful: UC Davis cantaloupe brochure
Votum
Original Author
11 years ago
Thanks for the ideas. Livestock is always an option. Chickens, pigs, and beef cows are part of the farm, and get about 50% of the produce that is either unsellable or doesn't move, the rest goes on the compost piles. I hadn't thought about value added products for the melons, but it is an option. Though I wonder when we would have the time in the kitchen with eggs & meat products we handle. I'll call some B&B's tomorrow. As for the market's I attend, I am the only only selling tomatoes by the bushel, ready to eat leaf lettuce salads, mixed pints of cherry tomatoes, and there are already 5+ vendors selling everything under the sun.
myfamilysfarm
11 years ago
You can also freeze, both cantalope and watermelon. To serve, don't thaw completely, serve as cantalope ice. Once it thaws, it get mussy. In Japan, they service melon juice, just seed and blend away. Also ideas, if you can offer samples.
magz88
11 years ago
If you aren't able to sell them you can always donate them to the food bank.

Marketing Ideas for a Bumper Crop of Cantaloupes

Comments (11)

lazy_gardens

jrslick (North Central Kansas, Zone 5B)

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Marketing Ideas for a Bumper Crop of Cantaloupes

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