KONA — After three years in their new home, Judy and Tom Migliori have a highly productive vegetable garden growing on a 3,000-square-foot section on their acre. Though the couple have lived and gardened in Hawaii for more than 30 years, this is the first time they are growing vegetables and herbs to sell.
When she retired from her U.S. Department of Agriculture job doing plant inspections at the airport, Judy wanted to see if she could supplement her income by selling what she grew. She was surprised to find she could.
“Market gardening is a whole different ball game, though,” she pointed out. “I have to look at every bed and figure out what plants will bring in the best money.”
According to Judy, her Genovese basil and Charger tomatoes are her best sellers, today.
Judy’s passion for gardening started in the 1960s when she found herself caught up in the “back-to-the-land” movement in California. A few years later, she started a nursery in Northern California and became fascinated with the insects that were plaguing her plants. She decided to go back to school and study the buggas. At 51, she got her master’s degree in entomology. Being able to identify and understand the insects in her garden gives her a big advantage in dealing with them.
Judy has always gardened organically, so she uses Organic Materials Review Institute-approved products to control insects that are causing damage. In a market garden, a pest or disease attack means time and money lost so dealing with them quickly and effectively is important. Judy is vigilant. She checks the plants in her garden daily, and if she sees problems, she acts quickly to remedy them. She is currently dealing with the southern green stink bug in her tomatoes. Organic products containing safer soap, neem oil and pyrethrum are helping control these critters. Pests like the pickle worm that attacks cucumbers and summer squashes are controlled by applying bacillus thuringensis (BT). When she sees a pest problem that is hard to control, she stops growing that plant.
“Sometimes you have to be brutal,” she said, “and just pull the plants that aren’t doing well or are hard to sell.”
According to Judy, as a market gardener you need to be constantly looking at the bottom line and asking if the plant is producing well and selling well. When it is, you keep it, when it’s not, you remove it.
Despite her willingness to get rid of a few plants every season, she still manages to harvest more than 20 pounds of lettuce and around 30 pounds of tomatoes a week.
A wide variety of other plant species grace Judy’s garden. Though her lettuces and other greens grow well year-round at her location, some cruciferous vegetables are seasonal. Her Caraflex cabbage grows with a lovely pointed head until the summer heat hits. Her yellow and white cauliflowers seem to do best from November through April. She finds that Imperial broccoli is a successful year-round crop at her location.
All of Judy’s plants are grown from seed and most of her seeds come from Johnny’s. Among the diversity, she has a few favorites that produce heavily and sell well. In addition to her lettuce, tomatoes and basil, she reports that beans are one of the easiest and most productive plants she grows. Her favorite pole bean is the yellow Monte Gusto and Dulcena is her favorite bush bean. She also loves growing pickling cucumbers now that she has the pickle worm under control. At one point she was pickling them to sell at the farmers market.
“When I ran the numbers, though, I realized it was costing me more in time and expenses than I could make selling the pickles,” she said.
She does still make and sell her very popular tomato jam, however.
Though she sometimes sells her bumper crops to Island Naturals, her husband, Tom, sells most of her produce at the Farm Bureau Farmers Market in the Keauhou Shopping Center on Saturday mornings. He usually sells out quickly, so if you want Judy’s best, you have to shop early.
Through her years of gardening experience, Judy has learned how to keep her soil healthy and provide a good nutritional diet for her plants. She does this with on-site inputs. All of her garden waste and the manure from her four chickens get composted. She has three open bins that she moves her waste through until it is fully decomposed and ready to sift and apply to the soil. She finds she can actually get usable compost in about a month with regular turning. Occasionally, she’ll add some organic Dry Crumbles fertilizer to her mix, though she doesn’t like the smell and prefers to stick with her on-site ingredients.
Judy also finds that crop rotation helps keep her soil healthy. Sometimes, between plantings, she’ll plant sunn hemp (crotalaria) in the beds. The sunn hemp helps to fix nitrogen into the soil and when it begins to flower she rototills it into the soil to provide nitrogen rich biomass. About once a year, she treats all of her beds to a fallow period when she grows her “green manure.” The health of her soil is evident in the robust health of her plants.
Judy’s husband has a full-time job as a contractor, so Judy does most of the day-to-day gardening herself. Marveling at her success, I asked her how she does it.
“It’s not a green thumb that makes a good gardener, but high attention to detail,” she said. “You have to look at your plants, see what they need and attend to them every day.”
It is obvious that Judy loves what she does. Luckily, she found her passion and pursuing it has sustained her in many ways over the years.
“I really believe that if you follow your passion, it will inevitably support you,” she said. “I love that doing what I consider fun is actually earning money.”
Diana Duff is a plant adviser, educator and consultant living in a dryland forest north of Kailua-Kona.