A Flowering Spring
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
Loy, Kaneish, Mitchell, Mr. Porter, and Amanda all have a wonderful selection of produce for us this week!
Kaneisha has strawberries and sweet potatoes. Loy has cucumbers, onions, cabbage, squash, tomatoes, peppers, mangoes, watermelons, honeydew, and plums. Mr. Porter has containers of greens and strawberries, as well as other fresh fruits and vegetables already harvested. Mandy with Mandylandfun has some sunflowers and tomato starts and possibly herbs! Mitchell has buckwheat and other microgreens and plant starts for your garden as well!
Everything listed above qualifies for our Wholesome Wave Georgia SNAP matching program! This means that when you take an amount of money off your SNAP card, we match that total with green fruits & vegetable tokens which allows you to essentially double your spending power at our market!
XO Tigerlily has wonderful dried herbs and spices, teas, and more. We will have Bon Bon Bakery, Ms Shirley, Marie’s Baked Goodies all there with wonderful sweet baked treats. Jams Jellies Jewelry and More and Rosa Ray’s Farm Fresh will also be out there with wonderful jams and jellies, breads, and teas. And we can’t forget about the arts! Prachi Henna art and Sonder Collective will be at the park along with Jump 4 Joy Creations! Hank's Food Truck is a wonderful way to enjoy a late lunch or early dinner at the park! And to keep us all smelling delightful and our hands clean, Chemscentations has us covered!
Thank you so much to everyone who supports this market! We are so incredibly grateful for all of you! Whether you are coming in the rain or the shine or both, we are thankful for the support you show us each week! Whether you have yet to make it to the market, but are sharing our information with others, thank you! We could not do this market without you, our community! We really do love to see each and everyone of you each week! We hope to see you tomorrow!
We are always looking for more people to join our fun! If you or anyone you know is interested in becoming a vendor at our market, follow the link below for our vendor application!
Just a hint of all the fun we have to offer! Come join us!
It’s Wednesday!
That means market tomorrow and while there is rain in the forecast, it seems like it’s going to happen later in the day after market time! So keep an eye on social media for an update if we have to call the market off for dangerous weather. While we are a rain or shine market, we do not want to put anyone at risk during high winds and heavy rains and thunder.
Rain is a great thing to have though! Soon it will be hot hot hot! Our gardens need this rain so that they can grow wonderful things to nourish our bodies or beautiful things to enrich our lives with their beauty!
Since it is still National Garden Month and the last week of April, I wanted to talk about eating seasonally. Gardens help us to do that. To have a healthy diet, we are supposed to eat a wide variety of different fruits and vegetables. Eating seasonally does this naturally for us! Seasonal eating is also a great way to eat on a budget! Because that particular produce is abundant, it is less expensive, allowing us to eat those foods for less money. This is also a great way to stock up and preserve those favorite foods for later when we have less food growing in the winter. If you have the shelf space or freezer space, canning and freezing are a great way to take advantage of in-season produce and utilize it later!
I love tomato season! I usually go buy a bunch of tomatoes from a local producer and can those up so that I can make soups, sauces, and all sorts of tomato-y goodness later. Peaches are another one that I love to can and freeze for later. There is nothing like a Georgia peach, especially in a cobbler!
Many of us do not have peach orchards and acres of tomatoes, we depend on larger operations for these things. A garden can help us to eat more seasonally and if that garden is large enough, we can put some of that excess bounty away for times when our gardens are less abundant.
Luckily for us we live in Middle Georgia, which means we have really long growing seasons and sometimes even two in the same year for some things! We have such temperate weather (most times) that we can grow things rather quickly!
I have some links to lists of seasonal produce below. I listed the national USDA one and our local Georgia one, because we all source produce from outside our state sometimes. Groceries are just that way. Luckily for us, Georgia has many resources that come from within the state and the Southeast, so our food is nice and fresh if we look for those labels and shop with local markets.
This is a handy link if you want to see where you can purchase food bearing plants and seeds:
https://www.snapgardens.org/snap-participant/
Here is a link for in season produce from the USDA:
https://snaped.fns.usda.gov/seasonal-produce-guide
And this one for a more regionally specific list is from Georgia Grown:
https://georgiagrown.com/find-georgia-grown/fruits-vegetables
This week’s recipe comes from the internet. It is a wonderful mix of early spring produce that I love on basically anything savory! From potatoes to rice to chicken or beef and any carb or meat in between! It is super customizable and this recipe and blog explain a lot about how adaptable it is for your particular tastes.
https://immigrantstable.com/sauteed-cabbage/#recipe
Bring your SNAP/EBT card to the market tent to double your spending power!
We are a partner market with Wholesome Wave Georgia to help make your dollars go further at our market!