Saturday, July 14, 2007

Us at the Farmer's Market

Today marked a momentous occasion: the first ever Farmer's Market in our little village. A couple of industrious folks finally riled up the board enough to get permission to use the village hall parking lot to hold a farmer's market. We were asked to join in. We're pretty "between" crops right now. All of our lettuce has gone to the coffee shop, and our new seedlings were all mowed down by birds within 24 hours of putting them out. We have potatoes like you wouldn't believe--the current pride of the garden, but Beo refuses to share (and I'm not about to argue!). We also have beets and zucchini, but we've been living on them. I wanted to be a part of this though, so managed to get together a few bouquets of flowers, some beets, baby zucchini, garlic, and herb bundles to take down this morning. I was pleased when I arrived to find that we had a good spread! There were 5 other vendors. One had a wide array of vegetables and flowers, another had eggs, a third had preserves, a fourth had plants for sale, and the last had honey. Traffic was sparse, I don't think we'd have known about the market ourselves had we not been asked to join in, but there were enough drive-bys to keep people trickling in. In the two hours we were there we sold all of our basil, mint, and beets, and a bouquet of flowers. I felt kind of guilty about the flowers because Bird asked the lady to buy them, and who can say no to Bird? The customer even asked Bird to pick out which flowers she should take. Yeah, that was all about those big brown eyes. People's asking prices were loooow. The only other veggies seller there was selling almost everything for $1, so I ended up selling my herb bunches for $1 and the beets were $2 but my last one I sold for $1. Tough critics. The flowers only went for $3. So I spent an hour prepping and two hours there, and made $10. $2 of that went for eggs from our fellow vendor. It was a nice experience but boy, that's tough money-wise. I won't be able to make it next week, but the following week, once tomatoes are rolling in, we may give it another shot. The money is not why I showed up this morning, it was a matter of being the change and offering organic local food from our own backyard to our community.

1 comment:

e4 said...

Very cool, very cool...