Sean C. Morgan
Sweet Home Farmers Market vendors, customers and visitors enjoyed locally grown foods Friday night at an annual dinner, capping off the market season.
Most folks enjoyed the lasagna a la fraga main course, but Don Herbison, owner of Story Book Farm of Sweet Home, said he had to eat crow.
By his own admission, he was most opposed to the decision to move the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market from the Thriftway parking lot to the City Hall parking lot on Tuesday afternoons.
“My sales tripled from Saturday Farmer’s Market to the Tuesday Farmer’s Market,” Herbison said. “I think it’s because people are so busy on Saturdays. All the festivals and what not, people weren’t coming.”
Families go fishing and hiking, he said. They’re busy on weekends. Tuesdays, they’re off work and coming home.
“I wasn’t in favor of it at first,” Herbison said. “I was probably the one that spoke out the loudest.”
Farmer’s Market organizer Jan Nielson was nervous about the decision. She didn’t know how it would turn out.
“We moved because we didn’t have enough customers on Saturdays,” Nielson said.
Herbison said it worked out great for him.
“My booth, I used to run it by myself. I got so busy, I had to bring my wife in to run the cash box.”
The problems were good ones, he said, as “every week I sold most of my produce.”
Herbison said he starts out the season with plant sales before shifting to produce.
The mid-season move produced several benefits, Nielson said. It worked for customers, and trees around the City Hall parking lot provide shade and make the area more visually attractive.
“We doubled our amount of vendors by doing this,” Nielson said. Vendors are able to participate in the Sweet Home market and still attend Saturday markets elsewhere.
On Saturdays, the market would draw nine vendors on a good day, Nielson said. Usually it was about six. Since the move, the market has drawn 13 to 14 vendors weekly.
“I had no idea,” Nielson said. “It worked out fine. We got a lot of support from Craig Martin (city manager), the city; and the chamber helped get the word out.”
This has been the most successful season since the market started around 2006, Nielson said. “It’s been a struggle. Now I feel like we made it.”
Nielson specifically praised Thriftway for all of its support over the years. She said she has no complaints at all about Thriftway, which has been “very helpful, very supportive” to the Farmer’s Market.
When the market needed help, Thriftway helped, she said. When the Farmer’s Market needed power for music, Thriftway provided power.
The next Farmer’s Market season begins the first week in June 2016, Nielson said.
The dinner, held at the VFW Hall, and a raffle raised some $1,300 for the Farmer’s Market organization, she said.