Back to Market

Yes I"ve been back to Farmers Market. After being on vacation it was nice to see all my regular market friends, and of course all of our regular market customers. Some are both. Both friends and customers.

I did win the parking lottery and had a car squarely in my stall space and I decided to take one for the team and instead of causing a chain reaction unload everything and set up in my usual stall. It's pretty easy to do at this time of year, as this week all we had was carrots, but lots of them packed in really heavy 60# bins, I didn't wreak my back after a month off, and set-up went well.

The weather was supposed to be not including rain but then about 8:15 it started to rain, not a tiny shower and not a downpour but a good amount so then the topic of conversation starts to be is it going to keep raining which could really kill the market or stop and give us Farmers all a break. Well it stopped, but did put a lull in the customer flow, but all in all we had a pretty good market, did actually come home with some carrots.

The seed orders are starting to come in and I've started prepping coco peat for starting them in, and I've gotten my fertilizer quote ( which of course has gone up in price, more on that later) and tommorrow I'll start in greenhouse #1 getting ready to plant. And no I didn't get any planting done in the field during the February window, I'm very sse against screwing up my tilth and running my tractor the the field just so that I can make a few more bucks. And most the time when I plant this early in the spring the slugs eat it all anyway!

Fertilizer. Yes of course it's price has gone up again. Usually always does. It's one of those costs that slowly eats away at my profit until I finally am able to raise my prices. Want to know what the extra cost of fertilizer for the year will cost me if I don't raise any prices? $782.32. That ain't chump change. But it's a bit challenging finding a way to pass that on to my customers, as I would find it next to impossible to charge an extra penny for something or the other. Oh the travails of being a small Farmer!!