Tomorrow's market will be filled with fresh and local. We're expecting six farms with loads of lettuce, spinach, boc choy, chard, green onions, radishes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, garlic, leeks, micro-greens, pea tops and more. Madewell Pork will be there and we'll have lots of eggs, raw food bars, kettle corn, vanilla, tamales, beef and goat meat and crafts (that's a photo from last Saturday)
Mabel of Harmony Hill will have ham and pinto beans with cornbread
for $3.50 – eat-in or take-out. William Adkins is playing. The Market Dude Frank
Reiter will demonstrate and sample Guinness Lamb Stew with Irish Soda Bread.
This morning we are holding our first classes at the market’s
Winter Production Education Center located on the Yang Farm south of Rocky
Comfort (photo below). It’s a new and ambitious step in our grower training. Open to all
growers, whether professional or hobbyists, it will host classes taught in
English and then repeated in Hmong. That is one reason for the location. It is
centrally located among our Hmong farmers and it is on a Hmong-owned farm so
when our three year project is complete we will have a very well trained group
of Hmong farmers who will be a resource to the larger Hmong community. We
expect the center to continue to function after the three-year grant period is
complete so it will continue to benefit the region by growing farmers who in
turn feed our community.
I think the value of such training is evident. Just think back five
years when we were lucky to have any produce at all during the winter time and
compare it to the abundance that we now enjoy all winter long. That abundance
represents significant income to the farmers during a time when before they had
no winter farm income and it represents better diets for us, year-round. They
say education is power and we have certainly found that to be true – the power
to be more financially successful and the power to eat healthier – and better.
Our class today is on Seed-Starting and I’m looking forward to
bringing home a flat planted with seeds (which I will immediately turn over to
one of my farmers to grow for me). Once ready those plants will go into the
Kids Community Garden. We’re hoping to get it tilled next week and soon children
will be planting potatoes.
Other classes are taking shape as well. More are scheduled for the
Education Center, as well as for the market’s blackberry demonstration plot at
the Southwest Center in Mount Vernon. And classes are in the works for the
kitchen. Some ideas we’re tossing around – a children’s class where they make a
supervised shopping trip to the market and then prepare the recipe in the
kitchen, classes on mushroom growing, dairy food - how to make yogurt, butter
and simple soft cheeses, making art with melons and berries, baking pies and
cookies, using fresh herbs, 101 things to make with summer squash, cooking with
and preserving blackberries. Oh, the list goes on. We hope to have the schedule
up on the market web site by April.
I visited with Tim Green of Green’s Greenhouse and Garden this week.
He’s already eating asparagus! He says
it’s three weeks early. Hopefully he’ll have enough to share soon. And I spoke
to John Pate yesterday. The peaches on the verge of blooming two weeks early. We
are all hoping the weather stays mild because a late freeze will doom the
peaches. (Let's hope instead for a harvest like 2010 pictured here)
Maybe this will be one of those amazing years when the weather is perfect and the harvest amazing. In the 16 years the market has been open, we’ve had one year like that. I’m hoping 2016 will be the second.
In the meantime, we KNOW the market will have lots of good things
to offer tomorrow. I’ll see you there!
