Week 2 at Farmer’s Market

Tonight, we had a better experience at the farmer’s market! We sold some whole chickens (YAY!), dozens of eggs, and various cuts of pork. We almost quadrupled our profit from last week, and we felt WAY more encouraged about the whole experience!

We changed a few things this week:

My husband built an A-frame stand, and I used 2 coats of chalkboard paint to make our very own chalkboard. When I looked up boards like this, they were $100-$200. The whole project took maybe an hour and the Farmer used scraps of wood from the barn and I used a can of chalkboard paint I’ve had sitting around forever. EASY and CHEAP!

I used chalkboard markers to write down the products we had at the market today, as well as the prices.

I cut a whole bunch of kale and swiss chard from our garden. I used cute string to tie up little bunches of the greens. We put a little sign out that said that anyone who purchased chicken or pork would get a free bunch of greens.

People asked what to do with the greens. I had some of my pork recipes (2 of which use kale, spinach or swiss chard) printed and set out on the table. I was able to hand them a recipe (which also has our farm website and this website mentioned at the bottom), and people really seemed to like that. We even made a couple of extra sales because of those recipes. Nice! 🙂

Our oldest son wore a chicken hat. People thought it was cute, but I’m not sure this really helped us get any sales! 🙂

We set the eggs out in a stack, to show that we had eggs.

We set 2 whole, frozen chickens out, to show that we sell chicken. We figured that if they started defrosting, we’d just put them in our fridge at home and use them the next day. Having the chickens out brought more people to our table, got us at least 2 chicken sales, and got more people to take our brochure with our pricing information.

We started taking credit cards. Yup. We’re just using the little Paypal triangle thing, and we were able to put up a sticker that says that we take credit cards. I think this really helped people! A lot of people only bring enough cash for produce at the farmer’s market. Meat generally costs more, and it’s difficult if people don’t have cash.

We used different table cloths, to make our’s stand out from the neighbor’s. (Last week we used red gingham and they had purple gingham).

We had all 4 kids at the market with us. They did SO well! All of them were great. The oldest 2 had money from washing eggs recently & we let them buy some kettle corn and snow cones. I know…terrible parents, ‘huh? 😉

Next week is supposed to bring even better weather, so we will see what that does to our farmers market experience!