Webb City Sentinel column - 4/22/11

The market is open today (Friday, April 22)! We have about 20 farmers and ranchers coming with spinach, lettuce, spring onions, asparagus, radishes, Swiss chard, watercress, all the early spring crops. Our sprouts vendor Roots of Life will have radish, broccoli and red clover sprouts – they are great with the greens.

There will be loads of plants. Urban Gardeners has almost 30 varieties of heirloom tomato plants. Fredrickson Farms has a wide selection of vegetable and herb plants.
Countryside View Greenhouse will bring a trailer-load of flowering baskets and planters, as well as bedding plants. They’re having their open house at the nursery next weekend and won’t be able to come to the market, so today’s the day to have a great selection of flowering plants.

Fairhaven will have their handcrafted planters and yard furniture, as well as about 60 dozen eggs. Broken Wire also has eggs and we have a new egg vendor, Apple Road Farm, with colored eggs.

Other local products at the market today – all-natural pork, beef, bison, chicken, lamb and elk. Freshly roasted coffee, baked goods galore, smoothies and freshly-squeezed lemonade, raw milk, local cheese, jams and jellies and honey, plus frozen blueberries from Double J Blueberry Farm and frozen blackberries from Shoal Creek Garden. Shoal Creek will also have blackberry plants for sale.

We open at 11 when the free hotdog lunch begins - hot dogs with all the fixin’s till we run out (and we’re ready for 400 so there should be plenty). We have free redbud seedlings, one to a customer, also till we run out (we have 300 of those). If we have any left at 1:00, you can have as many as you want.

The Clayton Singers from Stockton make their debut today and sing from 11 to 1. We’ll have a drawing for a copy of Simply in Season, a wonderful cookbook from the Mennonites that we’ll also have for sale. We have their Saving the Seasons book for sale too with tips and recipes for food preservation.

Next Tuesday, the Carl Junction chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star will run Cooking for a Cause. It benefits the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. They’ll be serving freshly grilled hot dogs, smoked sausages and barbecue beef sandwiches. We decided to replace the hamburgers with the BBQ beef because it’s just too hard to grill up 60 hamburgers consistently - and we think folks will really like the barbecue and I know our grill supervisor, volunteer Sharon Nations, will be pleased to not have to clean up after 60 hamburgers.

We’ll start our Saturday morning markets on May 7. It’s going to be a great season.