I Guarantee You Won't Sell This

I absolutely guarantee you won't sell something at the Farmers Market if you don't bring it to market.

Time and time again, the children have said, "Let's leave that home, no one will want that" or "Let's not pick that, no one will buy that".  The following weird examples:


- Cilantro that has bolted and may have immature little coriander berries on it. We had some of these "weeds" in a bucket one market and one of our Hispanic customers was very excited to buy the whole lot. Turns out this is a rare find and is used in some of their cooking.
- Oak Leaves and Wild Grape Leaves are used is some fermented pickling processes. The tannin in the leaves helps keep the pickles crunchy. Who knew.
- Dandelion Greens are very bitter "weeds". Many folks laugh at the fact that we market these. But there are quite a number of people that love them. We have one young lady that is now college age that would buy one bag to eat while shopping at the market and one to take home.
- Several green pie pumpkins were a coveted find by customers looking for early winter squash.
- The tops off the hard neck garlic are in great demand by our Asian customers.
- Leaves off of the green beans have been requested by Asian customers.
- We cut the tops off the radishes for one customer and the next customer wanted the tops to use as a salad green. Same thing happened for carrots.
- Purslane is a coveted salad green by customers from the north shore of the Mediterranean (Greece and Italy). Purslane grows wild in Minnesota and is one of the greens that is highest in omega 3's.
Reed, a freshman in high school, just laughs at our being able to sell weeds.
- We had a beautiful crop of "red rooted pig weed" in between two rows of carrots. When the weeds were at the baby lettuce size I cut about 5 lbs. Pig weed is in the amaranth family and they are a very healthy green. Since we have a reputation for growing unusual greens I was able to sell all 5 lbs. Go figure.

I think this list appeals to our desire to explore the unknown and do a few things that are a little weird!

The children get the biggest kick out of selling some of these unusual things and learning how people use them.

The corollary to this topic is I absolutely guarantee you won't grow and harvest something if you don't plant any.