Come See us at the Port Angeles Farmers Market!

The Port Angeles Farmers Market graciously welcomed us to vend at their Earth Day market last Saturday. We had loads of fun! (Well, after the first-timers’ nerves wore off!) We’re returning this Saturday, April 27, with some of our greatest hits:

• HUGE gallon-sized tomato & tomatillo starts (already acclimated to the outdoors)
• Fresh herbs
• Raab
• Green garlic (AKA garlic scallions–use like garlic scapes, leeks, or green onions. Delicious pan-roasted in olive oil!)
• Tulips

As well as a few new offerings:

• Eggs
• Radishes
• Salad mix
• Floral arrangements

Visit the Port Angeles Farmers Market website for more information about this cool local market. They have a weekly newsletter and it’s really hard to find the link to subscribe to it, so I’ll take the liberty of posting that link here. (Hopefully that works!)

I like to use these blog posts to reflect on our learning process as new farmers. If that’s too “how the sausage is made” for you, you can stop reading now. We learned a lot from our first week as farmers market vendors…

I wouldn’t say we made outright mistakes with our first-ever harvest-pack-sell cycle. The produce and flowers we harvested for market were ready to harvest and we gave them a chance to be bought, even if–as it turned out–we brought way more to market than we could actually sell in the mere four hours the market was open. Afterwards, we offered the unsold produce at a steep discount to friends and neighbors, gave tulip bunches away to the cement contractors pouring a garage foundation for us, and tested new recipes for some of the lesser-known veggies like garlic scallions and pea shoots. (Garlic scallions, in particular, were new to us, too!)

Having a chance to develop and test recipes will be incredibly helpful, and I wish we could’ve done so before the market instead of after. Honestly, though, Michael and I were both so stressed out and chaotic the week leading up to our first market that we were subsisting on frozen meals and ramen cups from Costco. It was not an Instagram-perfect back-to-the-land week in our kitchen. Now that we’ve had a chance, though, we’ll have much more information to offer to prospective customers who may not be too familiar with what we’re selling.

I was really proud of our tomato starts. (Thanks to my mom, Jean, for growing them for us!) There were a couple of other vendors selling tomato starts, but ours were by far the most robust and the only ones that were ready to plant. However, we forgot to bring the list that had the in-stock cultivars listed and tallied, and only brought the list of all the tomatoes (and tomatillos, peppers, eggplants, and ground cherries) that my mom started this year. Not only that, but the plants were so big and booming that it was really hard to find the tags, especially since we kept the plants in big, deep tubs. Good for transportation; awful for display. For this week, I made a clean copy of the varieties we have in stock, and we will transfer them to shallower wooden crates for more user-friendly and attractive display.

Our floral offerings get a mixed review, from my perspective. We sold a few tulips, but zero daffodils, fillers, or arrangements. Granted, I hit a total “florist’s block” on arrangements and utterly failed at my half-baked plan to arrange bouquets behind the table while Michael–who loooves talking to people–handled customers. I made one arrangement the whole time we were there, and I wasn’t even particularly happy with it. And nobody bought it. Boo. However, flowers definitely brightened up our table and drew eyes. This week, we’ll have fewer flowers but we’ll make sure they’re the brightest and prettiest we’ve got. We’ll bunch and/or arrange them before the market.

That last point leads us into the more general territory of “leaning” our operations. I first encountered this term via Ben Hartman’s book, The Lean Farm, and he encountered it in the context of the automotive industry. It basically means streamlining. I’ve been reviewing my copy of The Lean Farm and one of Ben’s suggestions that I’m going to try out this week is condensing the wash-pack process. Last week our process was to harvest everything into a bucket or crate, carry it to a second location, wash and/or trim it (depending on the product), and finally to bunch or bag it into a saleable form. This “batch-and-queue” method meant we handled and moved each and every individual item multiple times. As we harvested, we didn’t have a great idea of how many bunches or bags of each product we were actually ending up with. And we wasted product that got damaged from all the handling (many a cuss word was spoken as tulip heads popped off and tender pea shoots bruised and tore!). Ben recommends that as you harvest, don’t let the product leave your hand until it’s ready to place on the market table. We’ll be trying the lean approach this week!

I’m really excited for our next day at the market. I’m anticipating–hoping–that it will a smoother and much more stress-free experience than our first.