I am not one prone to like sweet stuff so it never ceases to amaze me how much people will pay for jars of sugar and fruit made into jam while they by-pass piles of nice green things. Another great seller has been the honey. I am excited about Mid-Kid’s bee venture and I am hoping that she will successfully be able to keep her colonies alive through the winter and into the spring. It was a bad honey year in this region, too wet so they tell me. Even the biggest apiary in the state ran out. If she can produce honey in the future it will be a money maker for her!! We sold a few pies and bit of bread….but mostly we sold aprons, baby stuff and doll dresses.
Someone stopped by our tents one day and asked if we would consider opening a small shop in the local mini-mall. Well one can’t call it a mall, it is more like glorified vendor space but it does have a real door that locks and looks like a shop front. We have never done anything like this before, nor do we feel like we know what we are doing, so we decided it would be something different and we decided to give it a try. Because the rent is month to month, the girls decided to give it a three month trial to see if they can do more than break even. The stressor is that our inventory was low and there is almost no time between the end of the markets and the opening dates. To complicate matters even more, they were already scheduled to go as vendors to Tennessee this weekend. I hope they sell out in Tennessee but if they do the next two weeks will be frantic trying to get inventory built back up….it is a good kind of feeling but no less overwhelming at times.
The weather is still warm and we are basking in it hoping it will continue for a while longer. There is still out of doors work that didn’t get done this summer due to my not feeling well. (As a slight aside, I did manage to get more done this year than I thought I would.) Our fall garden looks beautiful and we are hoping that the rest of the seeds we planted this week will take sprout and do well into the cooler weeks that will surely arrive sooner than later. We have been eating turnips greens for a week now and had even a few small turnips. Hubby planted our cover crops about three weeks back but it looks like it might need to be reseeded due to the lack of fall rains. (Yes, this is the Midwest, it is either too wet, too dry, too cold, too hot….)
This week Hubby planted our Emmer Wheat. This is an ancient strain of wheat that predates all of the gluten that has been bred into the newer wheat varieties. With gluten and wheat allergies in the family we are hoping that this will allow some wheat consumption again. Others have said that it has made a difference for them. One can substitute most things in life for something else but it is impossible to make anything taste like wheat except wheat. So you just do without it.
Oh yes, back to the trip to Tennessee. It is a WWII reenactment. The girls this year decided to go in matching day dresses for the event. Well at least in matching fabric…the three dress styles are different. It is all Dora’s fault really…as I was purchasing a piece of fabric for an apron she says, “you know this would really make a very nice dress for someone that is slim….” It did have all the right colors for all three girls. I walked into Hobby Lobby the next day and with a twinkle in her eyes, Dora said, “I thought you would be back.” Yes, they still do like to play dress up and yes, they are secure enough in who they are to do goofy things like dress alike. They are uniquely themselves and for that I am thankful. Their evening wear will of course be less of a “sisters” thing and more toward who can be the most beautiful!
Well, on my agenda today is cleaning out the garage. I hate this job. The garage catches everything and even with some effort to not let it get piled it does during market season due to the use of baskets and boxes. We are also gearing up for getting the carpet out of the kitchen….but that is a topic for another day…yet suffice it to say that the new flooring for the kitchen is buried in the garage under a stack of boxes and probably some other lost items. To be honest, we all have some form of Lyme dementia and the whole family suffers from not being able to remember where we put anything. Half of our time is walking around trying to remember either what we were doing or what we just did with what we were doing….and then trying to refigure out what we were supposed to be doing!! With that happy reality in mind, I am off to the task of rediscovering lost items!!