Fox Park Fair

Yesterday was the season opening of our little Friday afternoon market that was started last year. We didn't have a whole lot to take (scallions, garlic scapes, Napa cabbage, eggs, and plants), but we did OK for the first day. We used to belong to the Greeneville Farmers Market, which is held on Saturday morning and which used to be a nice homey, small-town, open-air market. A few years ago, a few things happened in quick succession. First, somebody had the bright idea to incorporate and become a 501(c)3 non-profit so we could get better grants. I was on the interim board for that. Then we were getting too big for the parking lot we were using in town, so the search was on. Once a "permanent" board was chosen, I wasn't in the loop anymore. But DH and I did attend some of the board meetings. They had a consultant come in and (supposedly) help them do all the paperwork for incorporation and then the request for non-profit status. At the same time, a "deal" was made with the fairgrounds for the market to use a new shelter that was built there for cattle shows - about 100' x 150' pole barn with no walls. The first year there (2009?) was OK. It was nice to be under a roof when it rained. But a few people on the board were trying to make the rules more stringent and were getting a little too Hitler-esque. The turnover of board members was unbelievable. Then in 2010, it really got bad when the egg and baked goods sellers were no longer allowed to sell without inspection of their kitchens, etc. Then, to top it off, the board voted that the vendors no longer could vote on anything. The board's vote was the final say on anything they came up with. (This had been a vendor-run market up to this point.) And somewhere during that time, it was discovered that the consultant had steered the board in the wrong direction as far as the non-profit paperwork, which had to be resubmitted and was finally approved over this past winter. So a bunch of us defected. Over the winter of 10'-11', one of the vendors talked to the folks at the Nathaniel Greene Museum, which now owned a vacant lot across the street from them. As long as we didn't call it a farmers market and as long as a percentage of the take was donated to the museum, a bunch of us could set up there to sell. And so the Fox Park Friday Fair was born. The lot had been an old warehouse that was burned down by some kids playing with fire. The museum bought it and cleared it out (LOTS of bricks) with the intention of making a park. There's also an old log house that's been moved there from somewhere in the county that's now in the process of being chinked. The vendor donations kept the grass portion of the lot mowed last year. We set up on a paved portion at one end. This year there will also be a Tuesday afternoon market, which helps a lot during the height of the season when things need to be picked more often. And it doesn't hurt that the egg rules have been loosened up a bit. OK, that's my soliloquy for the week.

Roots

I've been trying to watch the genealogy shows "Who Do You Think You Are" on NBC (?) on Thursday nights and "Finding Your Roots" on PBS on Sunday nights. I'm usually re-encouraged to get online to Ancestry or Family Search (the LDS search site) after watching them. Of course, I'm sure very few of these people (whether celebrity or ordinary Joe) do their own research and, on "Who . . .", I'm sure their trips overseas are subsidized by Ancestry, the main sponsor. I really don't expect to go to Flasch, Switzerland, real soon, myself.

Books!

Scored big today at the Washington Co. Friends of the Library sale. Got about 30 books for $17.75. Some of the haul includes bios about Red Skelton, Ingrid Bergman, Dorothy Kilgallen, Ed McMahon, Louis Jolliet (the guy who explored the midwestern rivers), Mariette Hartley, Paul Harvey, the "A Beautiful Mind" guy (don't have the book in front of me to get his name), a book of short stories by Laura Ingles Wilder (some unpublished previously), and "Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," not really a bio, I guess, but close enough. There's a photo book of Ireland, plus coffee-table type history books on Ireland and Gr. Britain. Novel "Beau Geste". A few kid's books for DGD, including "Black Beauty." An annotated book on some famous paintings. A Star Trek paperback, a Victoria Holt paperback that I don't THINK I've read before, a "tween" book about a student nurse, which I'll read and then pass on to DGD in a few years. Also "The Delaware Colony" about the settling of Delaware, "Unlocking Secrets of the Unknown", a Nat'l Geo. book about exploring some areas of the earth that little is known about, "Sherlock Holmes and the Thistle of Scotland," which is not by A. C. Doyle, but one of the present day (well, 1989) Holmes authors. Also "House Broken" by Richard Karn (Al on Hometime) about his house remodeling, "Rashi's Daughter" about Jews in Medieval France, and a three-in-one by M.M. Kaye, "Death in Kenya," "Death in Zanzibar," and "Death in Cyprus." I think I may have read "D in Cyprus" before, but it's been awhile. There's one called "An Anthropologist on Mars" written by a neurologist about some of his patients' cases. And DH got one about an expose' of the NRA. I'm not sure he realizes it's an expose', since he's pro-guns.

DD has already grabbed "A Beautiful Mind" to read. She's seen the movie; I haven't. And since we're from the area about 10 miles (if that) southwest of Princeton, a lot of things should be familiar.

Didn't find any spinning or weaving books at this sale, but I'm not surprised. When spinners and weavers get rid of books, they tend to give/sell them to fellow spinners/weavers.

And I have to find a place for most of these books pronto. The Greene Co. Library sale is in three weeks and I usually find at least a dozen books at it. I have a LOT of reading to do.

Spring Chores et al

Just came in from helping DH lop some bushes and trees back and had to empty the carcasses of last year's flowers out of my sneakers and brush them out of my hair. Did the butterfly bushes, which are in front of the heat pump to shade it during the really hot weather, but which had started growing horizontally into the fins, not to mention there were a couple of branches sticking out over the grass, making it hard to mow around it. So it's a shadow of its former self. It'll be back in plenty of time for the height of a/c season. Then there's the Bradford (Cleveland?) pear out front, which had suckers almost the size of my wrist and a few low hanging branches that made more mowing hazards. The redbud, still just a baby, needed a little clean up to nip off little branches growing too low, and a couple apple trees had big suckers because until a few weeks ago, they had been growing at a 45 degree angle and felt the need to grow new trunks. We'll give the apple branches to a friend for her rabbit to gnaw on. ALL of this cutting should have been done back in January. Oh well.

I also finally got the Napa, Pak Choi, and broccolis sprayed with the BT. The Napa has the most holey leaves and the broccoli's barely been touched (by bugs, that is). The Pak Chois in the raised bed are going gangbusters and will be ready to pick soon. I'd like their centers to fill in a little more first.

DGD is off from school this week and is visiting her dad, so we can sleep late in the a.m. and not worry about picking her up from school in the p.m.

NASCAR News: Yay, Tony Stewart got another win yesterday, though he was just lucky to be in the lead when the race was called on account of rain. It was past the halfway point, so whoever is leading when it's called is the winner.

Just a Little Astronomy

The Vernal Equinox is tomorrow morning at 1:14 AM. That's when the sun is over the equator in the earth's annual trip around the sun. The almanac says it's "the earliest start of spring in 116 years." I didn't go out to tuck the chickie girls in until 8:00 tonight and I could still easily see where I was walking.

Venus and Jupiter are quite close to each other in the western sky at sunset, but they were out of sight when I went out tonight (or at least I didn't pay attention to them). Their conjunction was a few days ago. I could see Mars almost 45 degrees up in the east on my way back to the house.

Got Eggs?

We set a season record for eggs yesterday - 18. Which means only 4 of the chickie girls didn't lay yesterday. And since there were only 3 blue/green eggs and I know all 4 Ameraucanas are laying already this spring, that means there are probably only 3 girls not laying at all. But not all the girls lay every day. For instance, today I only got 12 eggs. So that means those other 3 might very well be laying, just not yesterday. Clear as mud?

I have 5 boxes of 18 full, plus a dozen carton started, so I guess tomorrow is an egg washing day.

Gardening and Other Stuff

We now have all the broccolis, Pak Chois and Napa cabbages in the ground, as well as all the onion plants that will be big onions and about 2/3 of the onion plants that will be pulled young as scallions. Some of the Napas were bolting already, so they weren't planted; they'll get canned. The Napa seeds we ordered online, a small variety called Minuet, are all growing very nicely with rosettes of basal leaves. However, we also bought some seeds for a normal sized Chinese cabbage at a local store and they're the ones that are rushing the season. Most of them are growing properly, but about a third want to grow a stem and start blooming already. Naughty!

We're trying straw mulch this year, chopping it with a lawn mower before putting it around the plants. And we got some of the scrap rolls of newsprint from the Sun to use under the straw in a couple of the raised beds. We'll use it under the big plants later in the season, too.

Those bikes we bought last month? Our butts haven't touched 'em yet. It's been either too rainy, too cold, or, if the day is sunny and warm, we have too much to do outside with the garden.

Our Bradford (Cleveland?) pear trees and the flowering plum are blooming, and the bees are loving them. The redbuds should be opening next week sometime. I still have to cut the butterfly bushes back and prune the rambling rose, Gertrude Jekyll. The Gertrude flowers smell WONderful. I like fragrant flowers - roses, lilacs, lilies, hyacinths, etc.