The Labor Day weekend is always my busiest weekend. We have our usual Saturday markets and then have a Sunday-Monday market that is huge. The St Martins Labor Day market is a Farmers Market that over the years has turned into a huge flea market with beer tents and music and anything you can imagine. It runs along a road for about a mile & 1/3. Usually draws about 100,000 people or more over the 2 days.
We always set up near 1 of the ends by a parking lot as people don't like to carry the heavy stuff too far. The only real problem we usually have is the fact that because this isn't strictly a farmers market, they can want to get the stuff too cheap and not look at the quality of the homegrown vs the commercial stuff that is also there.
Often our tomatoes are non-sellers due to not being perfect. We often have to pitch a lot or sell as bushels or 1/2 bu just to move any.
This year tho, thanks to our experience with the Tasting Day, we had about 30 varieties named and sorted out on the stand. On a seperate table next to the stand, we had plates with all the large varieties and cut samples for tasting. For the small cherry / grape types we just encouraged the people to try one. We went thru a lot of samples and it really was worth it.
Soooo many people commented that they didn't know there were so many kinds of tomatoes even tho that was just a small sample of our varieties. The really great part was the fact that we sold a whole lot of less than perfect but great tasting tomatoes at $2.00 / lb and almost no one even said a thing about the price at all. We even sold a few 2+ lb tomatoes for $4-5 each and no one blinked as they had just sampled that variety and loved it.
It was just unbelievable how much of a difference being able to give samples made. If you want to sell heirlooms at a farmers market hopefully your market will allow sampling. Unfortunately my best market doesn't and I'm sure that has hurt more than a bit.
Carol
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