Editor’s note: This week, to tie together our previous issue theme of My Economy with the upcoming theme on Sharing Food, we’re publishing a five-part series featuring vendors from the Goshen (Indiana) Farmers Market. Photographs are by Deborah Haak and words are by Elisabeth Wenger.
This is Dale and Jo’s seventeenth season at the Goshen Farmers Market. They have the system down to a fine art by this point, but before their first season they were “very worried,” says Dale. It’s a worry common to all farmers—are these seeds I’ve planted going to come up? Is the insect pressure going to be too much for them? Are the weeds going to choke them? Is the weather going to cooperate? There’s a lot of trust required to surrender those seeds to the ground, burying them and hoping for the best. But plants grow, more abundantly than we have any right to expect, and so too has Dale and Jo’s expertise. “We were a lot more conscious of presentation at first, but now we don’t worry about that so much,” says Dale. Their customers stop by just the same. “I love having people a little bit backed up at our table now, the excitement of a crowd, and seeing all those people wanting stuff you’ve made!”
