This Little Piggy Went to Market

And not only did I go, I got to run the whole stand myself! I have never been to the Warrenton Market. Miranda has been doing that one since we started heading to markets. However, they wanted someone to alternate with her throughout the summer, and I feel lucky to be the one! Miranda made a map of the stand for me, but left it in her pocket last night when she went home. And Rachel and the kids tend to come to this market mid-morning to help out, but their car broke down. So this was my first time, never having seen it, to do the whole she-bang...and I ended up by myself! It was a pretty slow market, though, so I was able to get everything figured out and organized mostly before the bell rang. (Most markets have a bell that they ring at the beginning and end of market to indicate when vendors are allowed to start selling and are supposed to stop selling.)

We sold out of blueberries and Red Russian kale. We sold most of Rachel's bouquets of flowers and a good amount of summer squash. We sold all but two bunches of chard. For some reason, no one wanted curly kale this week. I suppose that's because they seemed to be opting for our loose leaf lettuce mix that we sell in 8 ounce bags. Oh, and cucumbers were popular today. I think a cucumber sounded good to a lot of people because it was, yet again, a humid, 95-degree day.

Today was long, too. I woke up at 4am. Made my way down to the barn at 4:45am. Loaded up my greens and other veggies to be on the road by 5am. Warrenton is half an hour up the road, so around 5:30am I arrived and started setting up. I ran the market, loaded the car back up, went home and washed my returns from market. Then I took a lunch break at 2:30pm, only to find out the US soccer game was not being streamed on the internet! Darn! I fell asleep just after getting the radio broadcast to come through.

I woke up just in time to head back to work with the crew at 4:30pm. Guess where they were? In the squash patch. You guessed it! And they saved the green zucchs for me. Gee, thanks! I thought I was going to get a little break from my row. Oh, and the long sleeve idea is going swimmingly. No more wrestling spiny things for me. After squash we finished planting a few melons and then covered the melon field. Then we went back to blueberries. Sigh. And stayed there until nearly 8pm! I got a little crabby, despite my best efforts to stay positive. That's a little too much work time in one day for me! I've worked a lot of long days in my past, but I think it's harder because I've always had control over how long I am working. In this case, I had to work until boss said we were done. And today that wasn't until we had finished to the end of the fifth row of blueberries. They are the smallest variety of blueberries that we have, so they take the longest to pick. I probably would have done the same thing if it were my farm, though, because we have sold out of blueberries at the Takoma market every week so far. One week we made $800 from blueberries alone! Each bucket is worth about $80 bucks and we had 10 buckets.

So there you have it. Lots of people ask if I have to wake up really early and if I have to work really long days. Now I can answer: YEP. :)

Whoa, I just fell asleep and then jerked awake because I thought I found a raccoon under some row cover. Goodnight!

Oh wait, one more thing. There was a customer (I don't know him/her) who made this video by our stand at the Charlottesville market last week. It's silly and fun. You should watch it. And see? There are other people who think about blueberries as much as we do...

http://www.marketcentralonline.org/market_central_site/Blog/Entries/2010/6/19_I_found_my_thrill_-.html