Re-inventing the season

In a space about the size of backyard garden, Calvin Parker raises vegetables he sells at Allen County Farmers Market, including this year about 2,000 pounds of tomatoes, 250 heads of cabbage and “I don’t know how much broccoli.”
Parker discussed the market — he sells there weekly — and how he expanded the local growing season with a hoop house, one of the Obama administration’s ways of feeding the hungry through giving them the means to be producers.
Parker gave assessment of the market and his role to Iola Rotarians Thursday.
Grants made available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service led to about 2,500 of the 48-by-30-foot structures going up throughout the nation, including on Parker’s spread just north of Humboldt Hill along old U.S. 169.
“They have one in the White House garden, where vegetables are grown and used by the president’s chef,” Parker noted, as well as about 25 in the Kansas City area. One situated on asphalt, with raised growing beds, provides produce for a homeless shelter in Kansas City.
The name hoop house is appropriate. The greenhouses are made of hoops covered with tough plastic — so tough that when a hailstorm damaged his home’s roof, it put only a couple of holes in the plastic, Parker said.
Zippers at each end permit the enclosure to be opened, when weather is conducive and also to control inside temperature. The sides also may be rolled up.
Cabbage, a cool-season crop started in his hoop house in late winter, Parker said, and tomato seedling were growing in February, and will continue to grow and produce until frost.
“The concept is to use solar energy” to grow produce when temperature otherwise would not permit it, Parker said.
“The tomatoes weren’t ready as early as they should have been because we didn’t have enough light,” cut off by dreary, rainy days, he recalled, but temperature wasn’t a problem.
While some covering inside the hoop house is needed when sub-freezing temperatures occur overnight in early spring, that changes dramatically once the sun rises. On an otherwise cool day, temperatures inside the greenhouse can reach 60 degrees by mid-morning and 100 degrees in the afternoon. During hot weather, sun screens — another plastic covering — are used to keep the environment hospitable.
Parker is an organic gardener, he became hooked in high school and college when he worked on a truck farm in the Wichita area. He continued to garden while spending the past 26 years — he retired in February — working as a chemist at Monarch Cement Co. in Humboldt.
He fills growing beds with compost from Strickler Dairy, and uses watering devices that surround plants and also inject nutrients to prompt robust growth. His tomato plants topped out at about 8 feet tall, and still are blooming.
Parker noted that controlling water in the enclosed environment kept his tomatoes from cracking and left them looking picture-perfect.

PARKER fears that “we’ve lost a generation,” of younger people who aren’t picking up on home-growing of vegetables.
“I read in an organic gardening magazine that 80 percent of producers are over 65 and only 20 percent are under 35,” he said. “We have young people come to the (farmers) market who don’t know an egg plant from a beet, or how to prepare vegetables” that don’t come in a container with directions.
The market is designed to lean heavily on local produce, he added.
“About 60 percent of our vendors bring produce, 20 percent baked goods, jellies and jams and 20 percent crafts,” he said. “We didn’t want it to be a flea market.”
Chefs invited to give demonstrations are popular, with Iola firefighters drawing the largest crowd when they came to cook one evening — the market is open on Thursday evenings, mid-April to mid-October.
“The firemen like to eat and they are good cooks,” he reported.
Some specialties also attract attention.
“We had a couple from Thailand, who were living in Fort Scott, who brought some interesting vegetables no had seen,” he said. “And one vendor has homemade soap.”