The first mobile market of the season was held in Delbarton last Friday!! The market, which is called My Mobile Market (mmm…) is an extension of the Williamson Farmers Market. My Mobile Market will set up at 7 different areas in the county during peak season.
Mingo County is considered to be a food dessert (as is much of southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky) and the goal of the market is to increase access to fresh, locally grown foods to these areas. The first market was scheduled around the Matewan Reunion Festival, where descendants of the Hatfield and McCoy clan travel back to the area to celebrate their heritage.
Our market took place from 3-7pm in downtown Matewan. Eventually, as I mentioned in a previous post, we will be using a 6×12 refrigerated hitch trailer to haul produce. However for our first market, since we added it last minute, we simply loaded a pick up truck and hauled the produce to set up for the day.
Our garden was able to supply most of the produce for this market, and the rest we received on consignment from Farmers. For this market we only kept 20% of sales. We were able to supply swiss chard, zucchini, summer squash, kale, collards beets and finally some tomatoes!! The only issue that we found was trying to keep track of produce sales between farmers. Overall the market went VERY smoothly, and the parts that didn’t go smoothly (like a 20 minute storm for example) allowed us to learn what we will need for our next market, on July 2nd!
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