First day at 2008 market was awesome!

Yesterday was the McMinnville Farmers Market opening day for 2008. It was a great day! Good sales; good people; good food. Here’s our booth, just before market started:

In addition to catching up with all our regular market customers, we enjoyed being back in market’s fun energy. Many of our market’s strong vendors are back this year, as well as a few new ones (including Rainforest Mushrooms, which fills a much needed niche at our market).

The first market was also the first trial of our new display. We spent the winter rethinking our set-up because we’ve never been 100% pleased with how we display our produce. We used a lot of differently sized baskets, which were awkward to transport and didn’t use our limited space very efficiently (our market maxes at out a 10 x 20 booth spaces, which is what we have). We really wanted something stronger that made better use of all our available space.

So, we built some simple wooden boxes, inspired by the lovely wood wine cases we’ve seen around the county. They’re the same outside dimension as our totes, so they fit nicely for packing in the van. Plus, they allow us to fill our tables with veggies without gaps (such as were inevitable between random different sized baskets). We also added some simple mechanisms (secrets!) to allow us to securely ‘tilt’ the bins towards the public, making them more visually appealing and easier to access. Also, I printed up some new typed price signs so that we could fit more informative text onto our price signs and make them more readable at the same time.

We love the results of our simple updates. The booth still looks in line with what we’ve always had (same green tablecloths, etc.), but it’s more streamlined and we can fit a lot more produce on display at once. You can see the display in the photo above and here are two more close up shots of other parts of the booth:

(We also had some lovely classic vegetable ‘heaps,’ ‘piles’ and ‘cascades,’ which you can’t see in any of these photos.)

A final very wonderful new addition to our market experience was some extra help! My mom, Kris Bledsoe, hung out for the first couple of hours to help us handle the opening rush. Last year, we realized that we were missing sales because we just couldn’t interact with so many people at once. My mom’s job, for now, is simple to back us up by helping weigh out salad mix bags, restock bins, and make the occasional sale. It’s a small but much needed role and helped today go so much smoother than it would have otherwise. We’re super grateful that she’s willing to help out all summer! Thanks, Mom!

I think our customers appreciated some of the changes in our booth too. Or, maybe the many smiles we saw were just because people were happy about market opening again. It certainly was a delightful day all around. We’re glad to be back in the swing of things.