We'll See You at the Farmer's Market!

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead well it is a gorgeous day here in the missouri ozarks but that is supposed to change any time now uh they're saying we're supposed to get some pretty nasty storms moving in later today but right now it's almost 80 degrees and sunny and a beautiful day to be working outside today is actually the first day of the entire year that i have i brought out my tank top it's warm enough for a tank top today i'm super excited about that along with the warm weather something else exciting happens this time of year and that is our local farmers market starts up last week was actually the very first week of the farmers market we had a great week and today we want to show you a little bit about what we have going on and talk to you about a few things around the homestead this year we are going to be selling plant starts at our local farmers market in ava missouri we'll be selling those until probably the beginning of june is probably when we'll stop we'll probably run out of plants about that time this year we're doing just plant starts and then the rest of the summer we'll just be concentrating on growing food for our own family rather than bringing veggies to the farmers market last year we weren't able to be at the farmers market because right around the time of year when we should have been starting all of our seeds all of our plant starts is the time of year that all of this covid madness started last year and there was just so much uncertainty uh at first they said the farmers market was going to be canceled for the entire year and we just couldn't risk starting you know a thousand plants or more to try to sell and then not have a place to sell them so last year we just had to take the entire summer off from the farmers market so we're excited to be back this year it gives us a great place to get out and provide plants to our community but it also gives us a great place to meet a lot of you guys one of the best things about being at the farmers market is just the opportunity to meet a lot of our subscribers that come out so we really encourage you guys to take that opportunity on saturdays from 7 a.m to noon to come out to the farmer's market in ava missouri say hello and give us a chat it's also a nice opportunity for you all to see the other vendors the other things that are going on in our area now if you come to the farmers market you might notice something just a little bit different this year and that is someone extra in our booth with us this year my mom is actually selling some things at the farmers market as well as many of you know my parents moved out here this last well i really last summer they came to spend the summer with us fell in love with the area and decided to move out here so they moved here last fall so this year my mom's gonna be selling some of her awesome homemade cookies at the farmer's market she loves to bake this gives her a great thing to do and speaking of kevin's parents we have been getting a lot of questions from you guys about how they like it here in southern missouri are they homesteading are they doing chores and how come you guys haven't seen them a lot on our videos well they do absolutely love it here in missouri they're making a ton of friends through church and everything else so that is awesome as far as the question as to whether or not they're homesteading no they're really not that's not something that interests them the way that it interests us of course my mom does want to have a small garden this summer and you know things like that but they're definitely they're past the point of their lives or they want to do anything on a big scale they do help us a little bit with chores as far as you know helping up lock up the animals at the end of the night and things like that but that's about as far as the homesteading part of their life goes they're just enjoying life being retired here in the ozarks and they're just really enjoying being closer to us closer to the grandkids and a little bit milder milder weather than they had in arizona and the second part of those questions is why they haven't been on many of our videos well you know youtube just isn't for everybody and they didn't necessarily move here to be a part of our youtube channel just to be part of our family and and closer and while they love watching us and they are very supportive of what we do here and on youtube they do like their privacy and just are really enjoying the time with us and their retirement so if you come to the farmers market this year you may see a couple changes that we've made this year that we think are very positive changes things that make us look a little more professional now one thing you won't see at the farmers market but was a huge change for this year was us converting this building that we're sitting on the porch of into our sprout house if you haven't seen those videos we did those earlier this spring we turned this into basically a huge potting room where we can start all of our plants in here so we no longer have to do them in the house before they move out to the greenhouse so this has been a huge help we had some problems early on with a heater that we put in here actually one of the ventless propane heaters we realized it was killing our plants which isn't a good thing the exhaust basically right the exhaust from that was killing our plants we switched the heater out for a heater that actually vents to the outside that has eliminated those problems and so now everything is working really well most of our plants are now out in the greenhouse we're going to go over there in a minute but there are a couple things left here in the sprout house that we need to bring out we wanted to show you those today and show you something else that has really upped our game at the farmers market look at these gorgeous little pepper plants kevin and i have been doing a lot of replanting of the seedlings to go out to the greenhouse this is the our two most recent these flats are both california wonder bell peppers these guys are ready to go out to the greenhouse because it's such a warm day we brought all of the plants outside because it is getting a little bit too warm in the greenhouse right now but because it's so nice and warm the plants should be outside anyway so along this side of the greenhouse is where we're keeping our peppers and our tomatoes on nice days like this now this isn't everything that we have started but this is quite a few of them this is most of our tomatoes but we still have more peppers in the sprout house that aren't quite ready to come out here yet now we don't start taking peppers and tomatoes to the farmer's market until the beginning of may so if you come out right now to see us you probably won't see these plants we'll keep a close eye on the weather we'll either start bringing them the week before may the last weekend in april or the first weekend in may and you guys will be able to start buying some of these plants so i wanted to show you guys something that we're doing differently this year that i think really has upped our game at the farmer's market maybe not in a huge way it hasn't really made the plants any healthier or or stronger but it definitely gives a more professional look and that is that we're doing printed tags this year now this is awesome for a couple reasons one it is a huge time saver in the past we've always just hand written the name of every plant on a popsicle stick and shoved them in the pots and to be honest it took just as much time to label all of the plants as it did actually transplant them so this has been a huge time saver but actually about a year and a half ago now we did a video where we actually showed us doing that and riding on all of the popsicle sticks and one of our awesome subscribers sent us an email and she said that she noticed how time consuming it must be to hand write all of those popsicle sticks so she actually asked us is there such a thing as a printer that can print tags for all of your plants at the time i didn't know that she wanted to buy us one but she did after i sent her a link to one of the things that can do that she actually sent us a gift in the mail of one of these printers and you guys it is so amazing so we wanted to say a big thank you to her and show you uh what a huge time saver this is just a little while ago i printed all of these pepper tags these are the peppers that sarah just brought out it's a really easy process go on a computer program type in the name of what you want hit print and out comes all of the tags that you need you can see what a time saver it is having this printer also gives us the opportunity to not only have the name of the plant but it gives us a named a way to put our farm name on here living traditions homestead and then also the name of the plant it just makes it a lot nicer we can fit more information so we can teach our customers more about what we're doing now speaking about teaching one thing that we get a lot of questions about every year from you guys online and actually when we're selling plants at the farmer's market is how to properly fertilize these young little seedlings because you have to be really careful if you don't do it correctly you can burn them you can actually kill them you don't want to over fertilize but they definitely do need something to keep them healthy so as soon as i'm done putting all of these in sarah's going to go over that with you and show you how we do it it's something that we've been doing now for years we know it works well and she's going to show you exactly how to fertilize these young plants so you guys fertilizing these seedlings is really easy very simple it's very cost effective once the plants germinate once the seeds germinate and the plants have their first set of true leaves that's when you can start fertilizing now you need to do something very weak so that there's not a lot of fertilizer and what we've been using for years is fish emulsion now it doesn't matter what brand just search fish emulsion or get what you can at your local store it's all about the same this bottle we actually got on amazon because we ordered it before any of the stores had their gardening supplies in it and basically you use one tablespoon of fish emulsion to one gallon of water and you can water that into your seedlings one to two times a week this is very mild it's all natural it's omri approved for organic gardening so you don't need to worry about putting any chemicals into your plants into your food it's just very easy smells bad and actually a couple months ago when we got this actually in the mail we accidentally left this on the floor when we were going away for the evening and our dogs found it and they chewed the top off of it and about a half of this bottle dumped onto the carpeting in our living room i know we told you this story uh not too long ago it was terrible you guys it got into the padding and everything so we decided we needed to replace our flooring but the flooring company was backed up for like a month so for a month we had to smell this terrible fish emulsion in our house it was disgusting but luckily it's been replaced and the house smells great again so we're relieved about that so i'm just going to show you really quickly how easy this is you can measure with a tablespoon from the kitchen if you'd like i just kind of eyeball it i just put about a tablespoon of the fish emulsion in the bottom of a watering can just fill up the watering can with water i like to do it in this order so that the water's mixing it up right away and i don't have to worry about getting a spoon or something and stirring it around and then really it's just as easy as watering it into your seedlings now there are other ways to do this especially if you have a lot of plants if you're growing on a larger scale there are things out there where you can make like a big bucket of it and put a hose in it and then it'll be drawn up through your actual garden hose as you're watering all of that will come out and that's great too we've used that in the past and it has worked well but really you know we're not growing on a huge scale and i don't really mind uh this kind of work and so this works just fine for me it's a lot less complicated so this is a really simple and really cost effective way to make your plant starts look beautiful so that you can sell lots at the farmers market and so they're really healthy and have a great start for our garden we're back over by the sprout house we need to take a little break in the shade because man it is hot it's always amazing to me these first few really hot days of the year where your body just isn't used to it yet i mean it's 80 degrees and we're dying in the middle of summer it'll be 95 and we won't think it's that bad at all but right now this seems pretty hot plus with that rain moving in it's humid today anyways you guys we wanted to take a minute to talk to you just about the importance of small town farmers markets like we have here at our uh you know local farmers market the town that we live in or the town that we live near and that we sell at is only a town of about 3 000 people but there are a lot of people who do a lot of things with agriculture in this area and in small towns all over the country we sure hope that you will take some time out of your weekends to get out to a local farmers market help support people who are selling at these things it takes a lot of work you may not realize it but it does take a lot of time and effort to put everything together to make a farmer's market like this work and it's possible that some of you don't even know where to look to go find a farmer's market near you so you all who sell at farmers markets who are watching make sure in the comment section below you say where you sell at a farmers market so that people who want to come and support local agriculture can find you and other vendors just like you so that they can do their part and support local agriculture at our farmers market you'll find a wide variety of things you'll find people like us who sell plant starts there's a lot of people who sell livestock you know chickens and ducks in fact we're picking up some more ducks this weekend at our farmers market uh you know so produce right baked goods soap leather leather goods i mean just a variety of handmade homegrown things that a lot of you could enjoy so you guys we hope you all are enjoying spring so far and you've just got that itch to start digging in the ground and planting some food for you and your family we sure appreciate that you guys have been following us and that you've joined us today to learn a little bit more about what we're taking to the farmer's market if you're enjoying our videos we sure hope that you'll hit that subscribe button before you leave and remember as always the absolute best way that you can help us here on the homestead is by sharing our videos on all of your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 91,621

Rating: 4.9771476 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, farmers market, home grown, eat local, local produce, local agriculture

Id: seDTrhh_0ik

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021