Saturday at Farmer's Market: Strawberries and Wild (but not "Organic") Oyster Mushrooms

Today we setup for our third week at farmer's market. We brought our potted plants, such as blackberry, raspberry, currant, and elderberry, as well as many of Melissa's native, medicinal, and/or tea herbs such as wild columbine, echinacea, and mints.

This Saturday was the first day we brought strawberries to the market. We had a modest but significant harvest (about 14 quarts). We priced them at $4 a pint and $6 a quart, which is a dollar above our other vendor-farmers, who get $3 or $5 for conventionally grown berries. At the beginning of market, a fellow farmer admired our berries, and assured me that asking for more for organic was a good thing to try. It worked well, and we were out of berries before market was halfway over.

We also brought some wild-harvested oyster mushrooms. It has been so rainy this spring, and there have been many days when it was too wet to do anything in the fields. This is the perfect time to go be in our forests, admiring the spring flushes of fungi, and carefully collecting edibles. I was happy to find a massive sycamore stump that was loaded with oyster mushrooms near the bank of the Kentucky River. The mushrooms were brought to market, and several pounds are bound for the dinner plate tonight in Frankfort and the surrounding area. It feels nice to share the bounty.

We had to change one of our signs at market this week, due to the wild-harvested mushrooms. One of our market signs says "Everything's Organic", which has been true until today. The mushrooms are not certified organic, so we had to take down the "Everything's Organic" sign and label the mushrooms as "wild". In order to market mushrooms as organic, a farmer/harvester can abide by the reasonable rules laid out in this document, which I find very interesting:

http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELPRDC5090757

As a summary to the article above...in order to say our wild-harvested mushrooms are organic, we must submit a process of harvesting to our certifier, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, and it must show that we are enhancing the natural system where the mushrooms are found. I'm impressed by this area of the organic standards, and I find it inspiring. It is another reason why I like to participate in the National Organic Program (NOP). I understand that the rules have many limits and sometimes are abused, but in so many cases, they are so entirely useful. Wild harvesting is just the latest area I have discovered where they are useful, because they really do have ecosystem health in mind.

The NOP is also very useful when it comes to seeds. No genetically engineered seeds are allowed in organic production; the organic seed market is a powerful mode of protecting strains of seeds from genetically modified genes. Another way seed users benefit from the NOP: Seeds that are kept within the evolution of organic farms pass on the traits of thriving within a biodiverse and natural ecosystem, not traits of doing well with generous applications of synthetic chemicals. I'll write more about organic seed production as the season goes on. . .for now, it is Saturday afternoon, I have returned from market, and I slept very little last night. Naptime.

2011 at "Camp Pleasant Farm"

Last Saturday we setup at the Franklin County Farmer's Market in downtown Frankfort. It was our first time, and it was a totally positive experience. We're all looking forward to a season of sharing fresh food with Frankfort! Its still early in the season of produce, so we mostly have potted plants and some garlic from 2010, but we're looking forward to lots of fruits and veggies and krauts and pickles in the near future.

In this second pic here, Sean is exhibiting how we all felt at our first market: tired. We had a party the night before for a few early May birthdays, we barely selpt, and woke early to prepare for market. It was great. I love exhaustion from doing what you love. I also thought that this pic was nice because both Sean and Katie look great, and I am vein.

A friend of ours, who we hadn't seen for months, came to our market stand and surprised us by saying that he had been following this blog. I was flattered, of course, but also puzzled. We haven't posted anything in close to a year; can you really follow something that doesn't move? Isn't that just called waiting? Anyway, that was inspiration enough to think about trying once again to share some of our projects and life via the blog. And now that I am house-sitting for some friends who have a good internet connection, I can easily access blog-ville. (Usually I have to use a community computer in town which that isn't reliable.) So, for the next couple weeks anyway, I figure, why not post?

Aside from growing things for farmer's market, we are also growing a ton of cabbage (literally, 2-3 tons) and cucumbers for krauts and pickles, as well as some seed crops like tomatoes and cowpeas and valerian for our friends at the Acorn Community who operate Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. (www.southernexposure.com) We are a certified organic farm so that we can participate in distribution of organically raised seeds: those that are non-GMO and raised and selected for their suitability within an organic ecosystem. While we may not need the certification for our local customers, who know us and trust how we farm, the certification is one way to help farmers and gardeners navigate the seed world so they can work with good seed.

Anyway, this last pic shows us busy at the farm, weeding one of the cabbage patches. In this pic, you can see that its a small mob of people helping which was GREAT. We have instituted Farm Day on Tuesdays, where Melissa, Sean, and I (Brian) spend the day working together at the farm. And now other people are showing up; yesterday we were graced with the presence of some of our good town friends, Katie French and John Rodgers. And we were super lucky to have run into our new friend Andrew, who we found on Highway 127, on his trusty touring bike, on his way home to Minnesota from Argentinia! Yes, Argentinia...he's been biking since 2009! Later in the day our friend Don, who runs Open Ground, www.openground.info, a land-based project for folks who get left out, stopped by with his new WWOOF'er from England. Its becoming clear to me that when a project gets to a certain point, it starts to magnetize people, and it feels like this is starting to happen with our farm and with the season. We're all looking forward to making new connections and strengthening existing ones. We welcome anyone who desires to come out any Tuesday and help us out with our farm day; it is a good time. We work hard but take good breaks for swimming and cooling off, and we have time to work and chat about life, farming, etc. The more the merrier! We also have plenty of space for visitors who wish to stay a little while. . .

I was hoping that posting to blogger would be quick and painless, but here I am an hour and a half later, finally finishing the post with pics. I can't promise this blog will be regularly updated; I put little emphasis on this kind of technology because frankly it hurts my brain and usually it just seems like I have better things to do than sit in front of a computer. But we've also made some good connections with the web, and met some great people from near and far with it, so I will try to share what we are doing, because I enjoy the magnetism and attraction that is bringing lovely people together who are working and learning good things.

It is warm, the sun in shining, folks are out planting summer crops...summer has begun in my book. Enjoy!