Another Saturday morning spent at farmers market. This could become a habit.
Really I wanted to just keep my booth space by attending a few early season markets, while I wait for garlic and shallots to be ready for market. They were planned as my main cash crop for 2022.
The spice, salt and masala mixes, as well as dehydrated herbs from last season, keep drawing back repeat customers who seem intent on pressing me for promises to be at market regularly. We shall see. A pesky little wind wrecked havoc with my legal compliance: food products need to be labeled with ingredients, and provide a way for the purchaser to track the seller down if they get sick from eating it. Those here’s the fine print legal compliance tags like to dance in the wind, making the display look disheveled. Sigh.
Wind also insisted on creating disarray amongst the block printed cloth and cards. I need to devise a better way to display the cards. Currently they are in a bamboo kitchen utensil storage unit. Today I gave up and reboxed the entire selection of cards two thirds of the way through market because I got tired of retrieving runaways. Spring is our windy season, after all.
Hand printed dish towels and tablecloths generated a lot of love and also did really well, in spite of all the usual display challenges inherent in an open air market. Some of which challenges I am attempting to address by means of repurposing old suitcases discovered in thrift stores. I am still resisting using a market canopy because I have problems putting the dang thing up alone. The shade would be welcome though.
Interestingly, I noted today that the librarian is still strong. I hadn’t realized I was doing this very librarian thing of grouping like things together for retrieval purposes. I have three market tables. The offerings are categorized in three big groups and displayed each to a table accordingly. Plants. Food. Art.
It’s what I do with my life (these days). Plants. Food. Art.
And storytelling. But that’s overarching. Invisible to most. Reaching across time and space. Yet hidden.
Being in the marketplace, interacting around my offerings, but especially the block prints, reminds me how much of a storyteller I am. It’s not so much another day another dollar, but another day, a myriad stories.
And there I was thinking it was all betrayals and burned bridges.