To market, to market
The vegetables are beautiful - now how do we sell them?
Last Friday, I packed up my desk and bid farewell to my classroom until January. I decided that some of the treasures/junk on my desk probably didn’t count as essential items for my replacement: a pink hippo which stores notes in its mouth, a little box of gratitude cards, an ancient plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex whose frightening growl now sounds more like a meow. And so I left, taking it all with me. Next time I stand in front of my students, it will be winter, I will be even more outnumbered by boys in my home, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have a novel draft under my belt. Maternity leave has begun!
The summer holidays have brought the gift of time and, thank goodness, a slight reduction in temperature. I’ve been able to go up to the loft without spontaneous combustion and have been digging out all the baby paraphernalia that I had pushed out of my mind – the breast pump, the baby clothes, the giant frilly crib gifted to us by my mother-in-law. And I’ve been writing 1000 words a day for the novel. My eldest continues to suggest baby names which range from Caca (French for ‘poo’) to Giraffe, and my middle now feels like someone has strapped a bowling ball to it, one of the ones that I can barely lift at the bowling alley.
Ironically, my time of rest and recuperation, during which I get back a semblance of the person I was BC (before-child), is one of the busiest times of the year for Farmer Joe, aka my boyfriend. The rate of growth of the vegetables is just astonishing. Coeur de boeuf tomatoes go from green to red during the course of the day and it is possible for us to eat a cucumber each at every meal, and still have boxes and boxes to sell. The aubergines are beautiful, violet and black, and I’m grating a courgette into every recipe to get my son eating vegetables. (It takes all my resolve not to shout at the end of dinner, ‘Ha! So you DO like vegetables!’)
On Sunday, Farmer Joe packed up all of his vegetables and went to the local market to see what he could sell. It’s a small market: three vegetable stalls, a man selling goats cheese, a fantastic-looking patisserie, a butcher and, of course, a van selling ‘nems’ (Spring rolls) which seems to feature at all markets round this way. My boyfriend was placed directly next to his competitor, another organic farmer from the village, but the vibe was not too cutthroat. There’s enough organic veg for everyone, I suppose.
My son and I decided to go and eat our breakfast in the café next door in order to support our champion farmer (also, we miss no opportunities for chocolatine with chocolat chaud, we know what we’re doing). I’m not officially allowed to serve on the stall, but watching my son run between breakfast and Papa’s table was a delight. I have memories of selling things at the market with my own dad when I was a child. There’s something special about the enterprise of it all, about the interaction between people, about the satisfaction of a sale.
Since then, we’ve opened up a little market at our house, and yesterday evening about seven cars rolled through to pick up their veg. My favourite was the family of three who bought nine cucumbers, saying that they would eat one each just for dessert. That’s impressive. We’re still very much on ice cream here. It’s a nice little spot, under the shade of a cedar tree, with the chateau in view. Come one, come all, we can’t wait to see you!
