As many of you will agree: the busiest time of year is here. Planting, harvesting, marketing and meetings galore. This last Saturday, williamson farmer’s market chaos started, and we went out with a bang. For our first market, we decided to celebrate both West Virginia Lemonade Day and Derby Day. We did a Derby Day hat competition, and had local youth set up and sell lemonade.
We ended up having four people enter the Derby Day Hat competition, and gave each of them a $5 Prescription Vegetable Voucher. These vouchers are distributed by the Mingo County Diabetes Coalition, and promote healthy eating the county. We have begun using them as a healthy incentive at the market! Our winner though, was one of our very own vendors, Arlene Starr, who wore a different hat every hour of the market!
For lemonade stands, we had three kids show up. This was sponsored by a statewide organization whose goal was to promote entrepreneurship. It was really great to see the kids working together to make fresh squeeze lemonade, and to share their profits at the end. I think this is a great idea for markets to try!!
As for sales, since it is still early in the season, most of our farmers only had greens, onions and some beets, potatoes and turnips that stored well over the winter. We also had some jams, jellies baked goods and craft. Very much looking forward to this weekend, where we will have a group from UPike coming for International Belly Dance Day!!
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