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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There. Said it. More expensive than Whole Foods and rarely better. Some exceptions, especially when apples are in season. But I'm just back from a prominent farmer's market in my city and spent a small fortune and I know it won't be better tasting than what I can get at Whole Foods this afternoon. No more. [/quote]

Not true if you're a foodie looking for a special beef, lamb, fish supplier, or heirloom tomatoes, decent silver queen corn.  If you go with a specific purpose, it might be the *only* place you can find things. [/quote]

Farmer again.  We grow "niche" or heirloom vegetables that you won't find at the grocery stores or with the big farms.  Most big farms focus on the common things.  Regular slicing tomatoes, silver queen corn, green bell peppers, green beans etc.  I like to try different things because I like the challenge of seeing what I can coax out of the dirt every year.  I'm also growing for our own table and freezer and there are certain things I LOVE to eat - like French Gold wax beans.  I love them, so I grow a LOT of them every year so I can put some up for the winter, in addition to selling them.   We also grow a lot of specialty peppers you won't find just anywhere, like shishitos, cubanelles, and pepperoncini - again because DH makes his own pickled salad peppers for us to use.  We have a lot of customers who are just single women or partnered women with no/grown kids, who don't need family sized portions of veggies so I've started to focus on the single use sized veggies, like baby butternuts, mini eggplants, and baby spaghetti squashes.  This year I'm trying some New Queen watermelons, they are orange fleshed and around 8lbs.  I just want to see what they taste like, they looked fun in the seed catalog last winter. :lol:

I also wanted to address the comments about how markets have a lot of non-farm vendors, and speaking as a market manager, that is because you don't want too many of one type of product because you will have vendors competing against each other and then vendors aren't happy and they leave and then you get a bad reputation among vendors which hurts your downstream recruitment for future markets.  It's a balancing test to get the perfect market roster for the season.    Some Market Managers also take a salary out of the fees (I don't, the market I manage is all community volunteer and vendor driven), and the space the market is held in may also charge rent for the space.  My market's space and parking lot is donated by a civic group for a weekly market so I don't have that problem, but I know the ones in the city do have that issue.  That affects the fees the vendors pay, which then affects the prices of items, and it affects which vendors can afford to pay the fee to participate.

There are a lot of things that affect a market that the public doesn't see.  But one thing I know for sure, is that [b]all [/b]markets would love to have more people volunteer to help, either with open/close, social media, recruiting vendors, lining up musicians, food trucks, or numerous other things that need done to make a market great.[/quote]

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