What to sell at Farmer's Markets until tomato harvest
 

I joined a local Farmer's Market this year (kind of an unplanned but so far enjoyable and somewhat profitable decision), and now that the tomato seedling selling window is closing, I need some thoughts on other items to sell. (And hopefully some suggestions on how to more fully plan out next year's Farmer's Market products...)

For now, I have some strawberries about to ripen that I can take, and the raspberries will be ready soon. I thought I'd also take some cut flowers, sacrificing my home landscaping in the process... Other ideas are thinning the strawberry bed and raspberry bed and selling the excess plants. Eventually, I will have a variety of beans, onions, cucumbers, beets, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, sweet peppers, hot peppers, eggplants, and of course, heirloom tomatoes from my backyard garden.

I'm considering starting some Swiss Chard, maybe some lettuce. I could always start some more seeds in pots for some vegetables that you would just as easily direct sow, since some people think starting with the plant saves them time...

No crafts are allowed, only items that you personally grow or prepare (flowers, seedlings, fruits, vegetables, soup, bakery items, etc.). However, I am not licensed to do prepared foods, and that is something I wish to pursue.

All suggestions / words of wisdom (especially from more experienced sellers and from frequent Farmer's Market consumers) are welcome!

I love my Swiss Chard, so I think that's a great idea. Asparagus would be great - but takes a few years to get established I believe. My green onion would be big enough to sell not. Oh yes, and I'm about to pick the sugar snap peas (yummy!). Baby spinach and baby gourmet lettuce mix also.

I think to a degree you have to play to your local markets. Some popular non tomato crops here would be corn, green beans, new potatoes, squash, zucchini, peppers, and okra. Of course strawberries and other fruits like watermelon, any other melons, peaches, apples, etc seem to do good here too. I have thought about driving out to the Amish areas and getting some produce from them to resell here in my town. I do not grow corn for example as I can get really good peaches and cream and silver queen corn from them for as low as 1.75 a dozen (that's the non bulk price and they are always generous on the counts ) and it usually sells in town for $3 - 3.50 a dozen. Another set sells huge water melons for 1.50 - 2.00 each as examples so there is enough room for me to mark it up a bit.

No matter what you decide to grow and sell just keep up with your cost, loses, that way you will know if it is worth selling. Again though I think it all depends on your local markets though. Most people here have no clue what swiss chard even is. Some of the root crops like potatoes and onions are a hard sell because even in big stores they are relatively cheap to buy so you might not make as much selling those as you could another crop. You also have to look at the visitors to the market, is it an upscale market, older crowd, 20 -40's crowd, etc as they will be looking for slightly different stuff and also willing to pay differently as well.

[I]" Some of the root crops like potatoes and onions are a hard sell because even in big stores they are relatively cheap to buy so you might not make as much selling those as you could another crop."[/I]

That's been our experience. I would add carrots, cabbage and brocolli - all of which are usually very nice looking, of reasonble quality, and relatively cheap at Wally World. We no longer grow watermelons - couldn't compete with WM on those.

We can compete with them on stuff that doesn't store very well - like winter greens, squash, green beans, okra and corn, which are usually half-spoiled and/or of low quality at WM. Their tomatoes, cukes and bells look pretty good, but the cukes are waxed and the bells are sky high in price. And their toms are also expensive and have NO taste - ours might not compare to heirlooms, but they're a LOT better than theirs!

And, of course, peas are always a winner in the South! The big stores don't even sell fresh peas. There's huge bucks in peas if you've got the land and pickers. People fight over them at our stand. We never have enough peas. Okra is a fast seller too. The BIG FOUR for us is peas, corn, okra and tomatoes. The peas bring more money if shelled and kept on ice, but there's liability and food safety problems with that (we've had big argumens over that in our church).

Of course, this all depends on where you are. There are ethnic/cultural diferences. I'm sure Tracy's swiss chard is gorgeous, but we couldn't give it away here - and, I would guess, our purple hull peas wouldn't sell at her stand either. Sweet corn and tomatoes are winners everywhere.

Jack

PS - Tracy, my back got well, but the doctor said one of these days I'm gonna be a cripple if I'm not more careful handling heavy equipment. I'm stepping down as projet manager at the end of the season. Our corn grower will be boss next year. And someone else will grow the tomatoes. I'll be the okra man next season (easier on the back - little stooping, etc). JME

This time between plants and field crops is always a tough time for me at the market. If you are doing a lot of plants, you probably don't have the time to do enough of the really early stuff like green onions, radishes and lettuce.

But if there are several Hmong sellers at your market, you probably don't want to do those crops any way. They will all have them and it's hard to compete with them if you have to hire labor at all.

It may take a year or 2 to see what works for you at your market. Try to find a niche if possible. As mentioned if there is an ethnic group in your area, try to see if something they like is growable in your area.

I've been experimenting with doing some sprouts this year to fill the gap. It has been up and down partly do the German ecoli issues. Also our roller-coaster weather has made it hard to figure out the timing some weeks.

I've also done well with having 4-6 varieties of Basil. It and Cilantro and Dill will sell after other plant sales die. Also if it's more of a city crowd, "cat grass" is a good fill-in. You won't get rich off it, but it has paid my gas to the markets this month and that's not chump change these days.

Carol

Hi Carol--

What's "cat grass"? That's a new one for me. :) Also, what in the world are "Hmongs"? Invaders from another planet? :)

Jack

[B] Invaders from another planet?[/B]

Hmongs are the "boat people" from Vietnam. In your area, they settled mostly the fishermen. In my area they are mostly farmers. I don't want to sound racist, but my experiences dealing with many of them have not always been pleasant. Often they don't follow the rules of the market that all the rest of us have to be careful about.

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The cat grass has an interesting evolution for me. I started this spring growing "wheatgrass" flats for juicing. It's something for the health food/ juice bar crowd. It's supposed to be a energy drink and detoxer. But you need a good quality juicer to use it.

Anyway, I had flats sitting on the shelves and some people thought it was "cat grass". But they only wanted a small chunk at a time not a whole flat. Since it has a short shelf life and it wasn't selling for juicing, I obliged the cat lovers and cut up some of the flats and sold it by the piece. Now I'm seeding it in 18s and sell it for $1 pot. Some people will buy a pot just about every week. The cats will eat it, just play with it and generally tear it up and destroy it. But it keeps them away from your house plants. All it is is wheat seeded very heavily and looks like a small patch of lawn.

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Jack, I forgot to mention earlier about the melons.

It may not be like this around you, but here where most melons are shipped in, we are able to sell plenty of watermelons. We don't compete with WM on price but on flavor. Like tomatoes, the shipped in melons are picked a bit early so don't have the flavor of a local melon picked "just right". We get 25 - 30 cents / lb for our icebox type melons that weigh between 7 - 30 lbs. We sell more too at the markets that let us sample them.

Carol

Carol,

Thanks for the wheatgrass / cat grass suggestion. How much did you charge for a whole flat, and where do you recommend I buy seeds?

We had a lot of trouble picking them "just right." It's not easy! When the tendril dies and the bottom is yellow, it's still not necessarily ripe - and everyone thought they could tell by thumping (I never could) and we still made people mad selling unripe ones. They are pretty cheap around here - in summer you can buy all the big, ripe wm's you want for $4,sometimes less. They grow like weeds around here in normal weather. Right now we are in the worst drought anyone can remember and everything is dead!

Around here we only eat the seedless middle of the melon and throw the rest away away.
They sprout volunteers everywhere!

Jack

Jack,

A few years ago we found that thumping is too iffy too. The tendrils are the key, but not just the tendril at the stem. Look for the tendrils on each side of the connection to the stem. When all 3 are dried up, THEN it's ripe. At least that's what has worked for me.

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Whistler,

Since I'm not fully organic, I charged $14 for a flat. An organic grower is charging $16 or more. You use aprox 2.5 - 3 cups of seed to a flat. It's seeded really heavy but that's how it should be. I'm actually getting more as cat grass since $1 pot = $18 / flat.

Check with any local farm elevator. We're getting it in the 50 lb bag and I'm just starting on my second bag. I'm not sure what we paid for it tho as Hubby got it from where he gets his corn seed.

Carol

ALL THREE!!!! Hey, you won't believe this Carol - but literally dozens, maybe hundreds :) of old timer "experts", starting with my father, have told me how to pick a wm since I was a child - and NOBODY ever told me that!

It sounds right - wish I'd known that years ago. I've watched the mexican crews pick down at Laredo - guys lined-up across the field, passing the melons hand to hand and onto the trailer - and picking every single one. They don't look at tendrils or nuthin', just pick all of 'em.

Jack

[B] They don't look at tendrils or nuthin', just pick all of 'em.[/B]

Yup, I'm sure they just do what the foreman tells them to do. And that's why people here complain that they never got a good melon at the store all summer.

I don't remember where I read about all 3 tendrils, but it was in some magazine ages ago. By 3 I mean the 1 at the stem and 1 up-stem and 1 down-stem. I'm not sure how clear I was about that before.

Sometimes at the beginning of the season a few still won't quite be ready. But you know they are awfully close. We always check a few and taste them to be sure we know what we think we know. By the time we are taking them to market they are good and we've had very few people ever come back and say they weren't good.

Carol

Found out the hard way one time which melons were ripe. The horses got loose into the garden... they only ate the ripe ones!:twisted:

[QUOTE=whistler;219023]Carol,

Thanks for the wheatgrass / cat grass suggestion. How much did you charge for a whole flat, and where do you recommend I buy seeds?[/QUOTE]

You can grow oats also as cat grass and I've seen some mixtures of wheat, oats and other grain grasses also. My cat likes to chew on both the wheat and oat grass.
It's like the cheapest and easiest stuff in the world to grow but I've seen it sold for some astronomical prices. The local pet food store sells it in little 3" pots for $4.95!

Another reason we gave-up on melons was crows. They seemed to know which ones were ripe too, like the horses, and they pecked holes in every single one if we didn't guard them constantly with a dog and shotgun. Some people cover them with netting.

Jack

We rarely have crows here. A guy here told me how to tell watermelon are ripe and it worked okay. dry stem it seems it was. I never had any complaint. Never had a heck of lot. Sugar babies and people never saw before it seems. I though good size and the taste is great. Raccoon went after the Rockyfords when they found out what they were. Rockyfords here are orange. Store here now sells smaller melons. Watermelons are high priced here.

I doubt "cat grass" would sell here. DIL was going to make dog coats to sell. People do buy and paid for the darnest stuff.

My market is small, but I put out a "Coming Soon" sign to advertise the cat grass, and I did get several inquiries. For $1, I should be able to sell a handful of 3.5" pots. I had maybe one or two inquiries about the wheatgrass - mainly "what is it?". Maybe I'll put out an ad on Craigslist mentioning that I have it at my specific market. We'll see.

As for watermelons, that discussion is not helping my original question since I don't have any space for them. Feel free to start another thread for that discussion, though.

I ended up thinning out the raspberry patch last Friday, and sold the canes (all with roots, of course) for $5 a bunch (4-5 canes). That was my big seller last week. I have another patch to thin this week, so I hope to repeat the performance on Saturday. Haven't put the swiss chard in yet, really need to do that...

Have you considered eggs, I know this is about what to sell while waiting for tomatoes to come in but eggs are something you can sell almost all of the time.

Then if you get the right chickens you can sell feathers for tying flies.
Dont know if you have the intrest or the space or what ever, it is just a thought.

Fresh herbs should be a big seller and something easy to grow.



Worth

"Then if you get the right chickens you can sell feathers for tying flies."

Are you a flyfisherman? If so, send me a PM.

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Whistler, it's very difficult if not impossible to discipline these informal threads like professional sites where people participate as part of their job. This is just for fun - more like a group of people visiting around a campfire - you walk into the woods to relieve yourself and when you return they're talking about some thing else. They may all be connected by a common interest, but the conversation swings to and fro. If a thread wanders. it's easy to bring it back to the topic with a single post.

Disciplined, all-business forums are useful for information, but very boring - [URL="http://www.producecommunity.com"]www.producecommunity.com[/URL] is an example. No fun at all, just work.

Jack

Jan and I took some tomatoes the last 3 weeks, but we also do well in the spring with rhubarb, fresh garlic and herbs. This Saturday I'll have raspberries and pie cherries. Nice to be at the market and have a little money coming in after the long winter and a really rough spring.
Lee

Green beans, squash, Squash blooms, radish, green onions, salad greens ( leaf lettuces and such.) I tried to have early tomatoes. Asperagus is early. Peas, pea pods.


Matters to what you can legally do. Bake cookie, breads jams and jellies. Dried herbs. Here market was very small and mostly crafters. We could not put crafts with our garden stuff.

I wanted to buy a salad spinner to do greens and I found too high priced.

[B]I wanted to buy a salad spinner to do greens and I found too high priced.[/B]

If you have a restaurant supply store near you check them out.

I found the same spinner that Johnney's sells at Restaurant D e p o t for $110. They have an online page but I don't know if the shipping would be reasonable. I have one of their stores near me where I get my bags and other supplies.

Carol
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why is " d e p o t" a "bad word" ??
I had to post it this way or it starred out.

Salad-Spinner
 

[URL]http://www.amazon.com/KitchenAid-Professional-Salad-Spinner-Black/dp/B000684DMM/ref=sr_1_45?ie=UTF8&qid=1308838802&sr=8-45[/URL]

free shipping and no sales tax

Goodwin - thanks for the pic. I really like your sign (and the fact that you're getting $6 / bowl of tomatoes!). Where did you get your sign, and about how much did it cost? I'm looking at inexpensive vinyl landscape (horizontal) signs, but a long vertical one would be very cool.

Also like your chalkboard menu. I'm using a magnetic whiteboard now because I already had one available, but the chalkboard just looks better.

Here is the spinner I mean. Much bigger than a "home owner" type [url]http://www.therdstore.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=90005&Store_Code=IFSES&search=salad&offset=&filter_cat=&PowerSearch_Begin_Only=&sort=&range_low=&range_high=&customfield1=mfg&filter_cf1=&customfield2=&filter_cf2=&psrelevance=name%2Cdescrip[/url]

Carol

[QUOTE=whistler;220015]

I ended up thinning out the raspberry patch last Friday, and sold the canes (all with roots, of course) for $5 a bunch (4-5 canes). That was my big seller last week. I have another patch to thin this week, so I hope to repeat the performance on Saturday. Haven't put the swiss chard in yet, really need to do that...[/QUOTE]

i have been doing very well with black raspberry plants this year at our market at $5 a pop. i dug up an entire section of black raspberries to expand my asparagus beds.

i agree with others that the lull between spring and summer is a tough time at markets... i feel like i'm treading water until blackberries and heirloom tomatoes come in in bulk...

[QUOTE=Wi-sunflower;220146]Here is the spinner I mean. Much bigger than a "home owner" type [url]http://www.therdstore.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=90005&Store_Code=IFSES&search=salad&offset=&filter_cat=&PowerSearch_Begin_Only=&sort=&range_low=&range_high=&customfield1=mfg&filter_cf1=&customfield2=&filter_cf2=&psrelevance=name%2Cdescrip[/url]

Carol[/QUOTE]

we use a washing machine specifically purposed for spinning greens for ours- just bag them in mesh laundry bags drop them in and put on the spin cycle... a real time and labor saver.

Biscgolf, I see the new washers have spin cycle you can set . With very many greens that would be way to go. Here I do not think market I could sell enough to buy a $39 one.

One thing about any of the above suggestions is to see what IS already being offered at your market.

If others are selling bags of cut lettuce and micro greens, don't try the micro lettuce sprouts. People won't buy that when they can get the big grown in the ground stuff.

I'm also finding that there is a window of opportunity for "sprouts" in general. I sold a lot last week. But because there is more "real" produce available now, this week it just sat there.I think late in the fall and if you have an indoor market, during winter and then again really early spring are the windows for sprouts.

In the past I've also sold the radish pods. If they are picked at the proper time they have the consistency of sugar snap peas but the flavor of radishes. Great addition to a salad or stir fry. I have a couple of restaurant customers that pickle them too. I usually cut the bunches and band a couple together and sell them that way. But this week at our Wed market it was SLOW due to rain so Mom took them off the cluster and we sold them in cups like berries or pea pods. Even tho we sold them for more than twice the price they sold as fast as we could pick them.

On the way home Sat we had to do our "rough count" of our take twice because the first count seemed way too good for what little we had. But it was right due to ALL the radish pods we sold. Mom was picking them all day and Ray and I were "hyping" them til we were both about horse from offering samples. But the samples really sold them.

Radish pods are an odd and unpredictable crop. If the weather isn't right they will get hard in a day or 2 and you won't be able to sell them. This week it was easy picking because we had cool wet weather and they had just plumped up. Next week we will have to be careful to only get the green pods and not any that are too "lumpy" or yellow as those are dry and awful. But we should have at least another picking from this planting and we have several more plantings coming.

The thing is, you have to constantly change your products as other try to do the same things you do. But sometimes you luck out as we did this weekend.

Carol

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]There are 3 - 4 other raw vegetable sellers at my market (10 - 12 vendors total). They grow with high tunnels and greenhouses and on a much bigger scale than I do. I have to compete on differentiated product - in the past few weeks I have sold the raspberry canes (sold out both times), fresh horseradish, a few strawberries, cut flowers, heirloom tomato seedlings, other vegetable seedlings, and the cat grass / wheatgrass. [/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]Some of those other farmers are bringing hybrid tomatoes already, along with cucumbers and other usual / normal vegetables. In a few weeks, I will have my heirloom tomatoes in all shapes and colors, plus red noodle beans, dragon tongue beans, rattlesnake beans, a variety of odd beets and carrots, and hopefully a large variety of peppers, hot peppers and eggplants. I chose to leave the “regular” items to the other vendors – if you come to my booth, you never know what weird and wonderful items I might have this week. For fall, I am growing huge Argonaut squash and the sweet potatoes that grew to the size of footballs last year (and still tasted like sweet potatoes).[/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]This is definitely a learning experience for me, and next season I should do a lot better. I am practicing my selling technique, making lots of business contacts, and so far I have made money each week, which is pretty good. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions – keep them coming![/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]--------[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]By the way Carol, I got $2 / 3.5" pot for the cat grass ($2 each or 3/$5). I only sold 5 pots, but that covered my costs for the flat. Plus, I hope to have gotten some recurring customers.[/FONT][/COLOR]

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]I’m going to look into the radish pods – they sound interesting![/FONT][/COLOR]