Westminster Farmers' Market

Westminster Farmers’ Market Report from Maple Heights Farm

Time to Start Planning your 2010 Vegetable Garden…

Mass Local Food is still taking orders and will be until January 4^th.  Take a look at all the new products  which include yogurt, locally grown whole grains, Smith’s Country Cheese, organic fair trade coffee, and a wide variety of meats. 

I’m sorry Mr. G...

Time for a change: January 1^st is here and you may want to consider resolving to support our local economy in any way you can.  This is something I will be doing more of as the year progresses and I was reminded of WHY it is so important last week.  I needed some balloon animal type of balloons this week because our daughter only got about 150 for Christmas and due to a little boredom and a lot of creativity, they were used up in short order.  I felt a little sad because I knew that I could have gone to Mr. G’s party center and purchased high quality, fresh (yes, they must not be old) balloons for our balloon twisting attempts.  But..  I helped put them out of business a few years ago.  They moved to a slightly less convenient location, and then iParty moved in a quarter of a mile closer to the highway making iParty slightly more convenient.  I don’t have a lot of party needs but sometimes I needed special items: cheap magic tricks for favors for a magic party, the occasional junky specialty items, great food coloring to make a John Deere tractor birthday cake, and really good, fresh balloons.  A few times I went to iParty instead.  Now Mr. G’s is no more!  I miss the store.  I liked it better than iParty.  The employees could always help me find what I needed and they were always very helpful.  And they were local.  I could have been spending my money to benefit our local economy (granted a very small amount of money, but some nonetheless).  For the upcoming year, I will scrutinize my purchases a bit more and seek out items from local merchants, first in town and then in our region.  And I will try to do my part to help keep our local businesses viable.

Time to start a few seeds…

Seed catalogs are filling my mailbox and I am trying to control my plans for the upcoming year.  This is hard for me to do because I everything looks so easy in January – in May and June, I find that this is not entirely the case.  Anyways, I have ordered plenty of new seeds to add to my existing collection from last year.  As soon as they arrive (hopefully next week), I will be starting globe artichokes and geraniums.  I start many of my own seeds in a cool room, supplemented by two florescent grow lights (four long bulbs).  I use wood ash to head off damping off, and I use a small amount of kelp and eggshells for fertilizer.  This year I plan to do more and may hang two more lights beneath the existing table.