Author: Jennifer Giovanniello

Thankfully we’ve seen much better weather since we last wrote! It was overcast with no threat of rain, so we had a larger crowd at this veggie stand as opposed to the last. We offered produce not only from LaFarm, the Easton Urban Farm, Crayola, and Safe Harbor as usual, but we also had a few on-site donations, the first of the season. Sophia harvested several cucumbers on behalf of a community gardener at one of the plots at 10th and Pine, and stand newcomer Karen gave us several shopping bags full of oregano, parsley, and lemon balm (which is supposedly very good in tea, especially when mixed with mint). They were the first on-site stand donations that we’ve seen this season, which was gratifying and exciting to see. We hope that we’ll see more!

Tomato season is now officially in full force– we had roughly five or more bins worth of both cherry and large tomatoes, both from LaFarm and the Urban Farm. It took a semi-exhaustive harvest to get them all there that Lisa compared to spelunking– crouching between rows of semi-sprawling tomato plants, trying to reach through the dense tangle of branches. We consistently got our hands covered in tomato sap, but all of the time spent harvesting was well worth it– we had plenty for the veggie stand, so much so that we had plenty of leftovers to donate to the Neighborhood Center at the end of the night in spite of people’s enthusiasm to see tomatoes available.

We’ve also changed a few things since the last stand– based on our visitors’ understandably low enthusiasm for filling out our surveys, we didn’t distribute any this week, but instead made the main focus of our information table about asking people for their recipes/pictures of their cooking for the cookbook that we want to compile (hopefully to be completed by the end of the summer, depending on how many recipes we get). We left mostly blank sheets of paper on the table for this purpose, for people to either fill out on at the stand if they felt really inspired (like one of our volunteers, Eve, did last night) or to take home to fill out and give back to us later. Already, we had one person hand us a recipe that she had filled out for us a week ago, and many more people (at least ten!) picked up sheets to fill out and give back to us.

Being the designated person to run the info table this week, I noticed how much lighter the atmosphere felt when I talked to people about recipes instead of surveys. I think that also from the standpoint of community ownership in this project that this is a really encouraging project to collaborate on. I’m personally excited see what recipes we’ll receive in the weeks to come, and how much more we all can learn about how to prepare (and then talk about preparing) vegetables.

Besides the emphasis on recipes for this week, we also had signup sheets on the info table for people to volunteer for helping set up the stand, which I would talk about if people asked me about it. Since most of our potential student volunteers are starting to go home, it would be great to get additional support from new volunteers. We haven’t gotten any signups yet, but we’ll see what happens in the next few weeks. We’re also continuing to raffle off cooking supplies (we’ll be giving everything away on our final veggie stand of the year, September 13th) and to have weekly stand activities– this week, Miranda put together face- and banner-painting. Several people lingered, and people talked to us about their cooking, all of which made this week’s veggie stand a really enjoyable one.

After weeks of farming and preparing for the first veggie stand of the season, it comes as a relief to all of us interns to have had strong launch this past week. With clear skies, abundant harvests, and the help of Sophia, Steve, and a number of student volunteers, the tents were set up and the Safe Harbor produce was weighed in time for 5:30. Apart from us feeling a little frazzled about what to set up first, setup went relatively smoothly, and we decided it would be wise to plan a general sequence or checklist of things that we need to do in order to make the process a little less stressful.

We saw 39 attendees come and go with bags full of veggies, and we had plenty left over to be donated to the Easton Area Neighborhood Center afterward (much thanks to the harvests from LaFarm, the Easton Urban Farm, Crayola, and the Safe Harbor community garden). We also had some kale recipes available, distributed a survey on food security, and Miranda hosted a flower-pressing activity that drew the attention of several kids.

Above: a few of our volunteers handing out produce last week.

We had advertised about a week in advance, posting on the ViC Facebook page and distributing flyers in widening circles around 10th and Pine (our stand location), and it seems that Facebook was the more successful method of the two, even though both drew visitors to the stand (that, and most notably, Sophia spreading the word throughout the neighborhood). In the future we definitely want to make regular use of Facebook to advertise our weekly activities and have more conversations with people in the neighborhood and community leaders to better spread the word about our stand.

Thursday’s stand went well, especially in terms of our range of available produce and the number of families that we fed– approximately 75! We also had some of the first tomatoes of the season available this week, and they (unsurprisingly) sold very well.

This week’s experience was most similar to our professors’ descriptions of what the Markets at 10th and Pine have been like in years past, with a line forming as early as thirty minutes in advance, and with a slightly overwhelming initial rush of people. As our professors have told us before we began running the stands, it is during this initial rush that produce flies off of the tables– especially popular items like tomatoes and potatoes. This week definitely lived up to that expectation, since the more high-demand items, like green beans and tomatoes, were gone before the initial flood of people had even subsided. The only reason why we didn’t run out of other popular items, such as peppers and potatoes, was because we had received a very generous amount of both from Crayola’s farm in Forks, so we had enough to last us about halfway through the evening.

I worked on restocking the supply of tomatoes, carrying two pint-sized cartons to the table at a time. I was constantly restocking, and it was a brief job given how quickly the tomatoes were taken– it seemed that as soon as I replenished the tables with two more pint-sized cartons, two more were gone. While the fast consumption of our produce is certainly encouraging, the customers who came to the stand after the initial rush were discouraged by the fact that the more popular items had been taken in such a short span of time. These customers then decided that it would be better for them to come to the stand earlier, which is a bit stressful for the ViC team to hear about. Not only does such thinking point to the possibility that customers are treating our stand as if it is similar to a food pantry, but if more people think that they must come to the stand early to receive the most desirable produce, then it contributes to the initial rush, which can be overwhelming for us.

Some possible solutions that we have brainstormed about include replenishing the stocks of produce on the tables more strategically, so that high-demand items like tomatoes can stay on the tables for a longer period of time. We also talked about possibly labeling such items as having limited stock, and leaving an additional suggested donation amount for that particular item. We also are more determined to start the stand at exactly 5:30 next week, and not ten minutes earlier like this week.

In the weeks to come, we also plan on having an informational table set up– complete with a sign-up sheet for Easton Urban Farm volunteers, a poster providing information about LaFarm and the Urban Farm, and optional surveys for customers. We’re also looking to have a presence at 10th and Pine during Easton’s National Night Out by hosting a potluck. So, between getting an info table set up for next week, and having ourselves set up at 10th and Pine for two days out of the week, it will be a bit of a busier week for ViC, but definitely a productive and exciting one!