What are the top 5 sellers in a Produce stand?

[PennyM]

By far tomatoes are #1.
Here's one of my Tomato displays.
When I owned my own Produce Market
I got so many great recipes from my customers in Myrtle Beach, SC. And man, did I ever hear about 'Mater sandwiches'.
#2 was sweet corn, #3 Peaches, #4 Watermelons and #5? Believe it or not Boiled Peanuts. Our secret ingredients were to use Vegetable Bullion and Beer in it topped off with a Chile pepper.

Tomato-Ly Yours,
Penny

[JackE]

Same with us - tomatoes! Sweet corn goes fast too, but it's not a good crop for us because it all comes-in at the same time.

Purple hull peas are big too - and okra. Those would be our best sellers after tomatoes - stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't carry - or if they do have it, it's of low quality.

It's all about tomatoes - without tomatoes our stand would be a loser!

Jack

[tam91]

Somehow, the guys here have corn all season. My favorite thing to buy, of course, since I have tomatoes at home. They must just plant blocks of corn at staggered times.

[BigBrownDogHouse]

Originally Posted by tam91

Somehow, the guys here have corn all season. My favorite thing to buy, of course, since I have tomatoes at home. They must just plant blocks of corn at staggered times.

Are you still getting some here in the hood? Our favorite farmstand has been out of it for a couple of weeks now.

[JackE]

HI TRACY!!

I've tried and tried, for years and years, to stagger corn and it just won't work here. It just gets too hot too fast. Our planting window is from 2/15 to 3/15, and it always seems to come-in at virtually the same time - one big picking and then a couple small ones a few days later.

We usually have an 8' pickup bed overflowing on the main picking and we sell it right out of the truck. People are all over it like ants! A couple years ago, so many cars stopped on the highway, right in downtown Woodville, that it created a traffic blockage. The cops came and everything (we pacified them with a couple bags of corn).

We could sell a lot of watermelons, but the elderly ladies that run the stand can't handle them.

As most of you know, we are a charity and operate on a voluntary donation basis. Interestingly, virtually all our revenues over expenses come from the tomatoes. The rest of the produce barely pays expenses, but the toms stop traffic on the highway and many of those folks are very generous - the donation can is full of fives, tens and twenties when we have toms. Our local people put in a dollar bill, or some change, and take a lot of stuff - but that's what we're there for, to help poorer people. We do like to pay for chems, fuel, fert and seed though.

If this drought doesn't break pretty soon - and they say it won't - we'll be out of business. I have just gotten about 10,000 sq ft under drip irrigation from a small well - enough to plant maybe 800-1000 toms next year but nothing else - at a cost of 3K out of my own pocket. I might not have any labor, though - we've been shut-down since we lost our irrigation water about 6/1 and our volunteers have drifted away to other activities. I can't grow the toms without help.

Jack

[tam91]

Brian, I haven't looked for corn lately - just been too busy. Seems pretty late though, I'd expect it to probably be gone. I usually go to the field where they sell it off the trailer on Walkup, which is part of the fruitstand up further north also on Walkup.

Wow Jack, I am so sorry you're having such a hard time. Bummer also, that the corn won't work staggered for you.

Could you grow some of those small watermelon varieties? We have mini ones in the stores that older ladies could easily handle. They're kinda cute actually.

[BigBrownDogHouse]

Originally Posted by tam91

Brian, I haven't looked for corn lately - just been too busy. Seems pretty late though, I'd expect it to probably be gone. I usually go to the field where they sell it off the trailer on Walkup, which is part of the fruitstand up further north also on Walkup.

I figured you were referring to earlier in the season. I just wanted to check since everyone in the family has had a taste for sweet corn from the farm recently. We did eat our share during the Summer though.

You must know my buddy Elmer then. I believe he works that trailer stand for them.
We usually go to Stade's on the other side of town.

In our area, there's so many great roadside stands to get sweet corn. One of the things Illinois does really well!

I drove up to Burlington Wisconsin(about 28 miles) a couple of months back and passed about a dozen roadside, help yourself, honor system corn stands on the backroads. Too many to choose from but really cool!

[JackE]

Tracy, you can't believe how bad this drought is! Never been anything even close before - it's of biblical proportions! Ag losses in Texas are approaching 6 billion $, many reservoirs are completely dry, including our 4 acre lake (which has never been this low in my lifetime). Worst of all, though, were the fires. Our member here, Worth, would have been burned alive if the wind had shifted! For awhile we were afraid to go to sleep at night as fires raged all over the area. Next year will be the same, they say - it's going to be a multi-year drought. I may not plant anything except our home garden.

Thousands of homes have burned, but loss of life has so far been moderate. It's even worse over where Worth and Suze are - we've had a little rain(darn little) but they have had none - zero, zilch, nada! I shudder to think what will happen next year when all the pines trees in the timber plantations begin to die!

Jack

[tam91]

Jack, I have been following those stores on t-ville. Truly terrible. I can't even think of anything to say.

[biscgolf]

our farmers market as a whole is definitely driven by tomatoes and sweet corn when in season...
peaches do well in their time, as do apples right now.

blackberries were my best selling item by a good bit this year since not everyone had them (unlike tomatoes) and my competition with them was way overpriced.

i've been selling a goodly number of hot peppers lately which truthfully i find a bit of a surprise.

[JackE]

Maybe people are learning what we always knew - hot peppers are an appetite suppressant. As kids, they kept us from feeling hunger when times were tough - but now we use them to lose weight - and also to make salt-free diets a little more palatable.

Poor rural people in the deep South used to have to eat a lot of stuff that, while nutritious, may not have been all that tasty - turtles, buffalo carp, coons, possums, squirrels, blackbirds etc along with various less appetizing parts of hogs and cows. My mother cooked all that stuff with new potatoes corn, okra, dried beans/peas - whatever she had - and a couple of cayenne peppers in the pot made it [marginally] fit for human consumption. As times improved after WWII, we didn't have to eat that stuff anymore!

When the Dr recently made me cut-back the salt, that experience came in handy - a dash of Tabasco makes bland and bad-tasting food edible.

Jack

[gourmetgardener]

I would say peaches, sweet corn, melons, tomatoes, apples. Big problem with tomatoes is too many marginal growers selling poor product for dirt cheap. Best sellers were grape types (Solid Gold, Tomatoberry, Sunstream, Montessino), followed by Roma (Granadero), Cocktail (Campari types), Beefsteak (Cobra and Geronimo), then San Marzano (Atavico).

[Wi-sunflower]

I agree with Gourmet about too many growers selling tomatoes at my market too cheap.

At my market you are SUPPOSED to only sell what YOU grow. But there are a few growers that manage to sneak in wholesale stuff that is perfect looking but tasteless. So if you have good tasting but blemished heirlooms and can't give tastes, you just about have to give them away.

So while I grow out a WHOLE LOT of varieties and sizes, I mostly take only the small cherries and grape types to market. I take a whole rainbow and let customers taste as much as they want and it's the taste that sells them.

It truly IS the taste that sells them. At a market that lets me sample, I cut up about a dozen great heirlooms for tasting. That market is usually dirt cheap with customers looking for bushels of canning tomatoes for $10-15. But after tasting some of mine, they paid $2 / lb for mine. A few of them were $4-5 / tomato (2+ lbs each).

As for other things, it can be whatever YOU do a good job of. We do a whole lot of varieties of winter squash in fall. Some years more than 15 varieties. We have the biggest display within the rules on the square and are almost the only vendor that sells by the bushel bag (onion sacks).

I have also been selling Brussels Sprouts "on the stalk" for more than 25 years. While not one of the more popular crops, because I usually have the only stalks that are full to the top, I will sell out almost every week we have them. Anywhere from 50 to 150 stalks / week.

If you find something that you love and do it well, usually you will do well selling it.

Carol

[Wi-sunflower]

OOOPPS, forgot to mention the watermelons.

We grow just the "icebox" types that only grow in the 10 - 20 lb range. Partly because we don't have the season for the biggies without doing plastic and all kinds of other season extension stuff.

But varieties like Sugar Baby, Crimson Sweet, Sweet Siberian and Desert King (biggest in bunch) do well for us. If you can sample that's the best. But even where we can't sample, we do well and get plenty of repeat customers because too many of the shipped in melons are like the shipped in tomatoes -- picked too early and therefore tasteless.

There is also a bit of a backlash in my area AGAINST seedless melons due to the fact that too often they are rather tasteless. In my opinion they are just too fussy to grow and the seed is way too expensive.

Carol

[biscgolf]

jack- have you tried planting multiple varieties of sweet corn at the same time to achieve the effect of staggering it? that has worked better for us here.

on tomatoes- EVERYONE from the big growers to the small at our market has heirlooms- i'm cutting way back on them and growing a wider variety of cherries/plums/romas, etc next year. small tomatoes are less of a pain to grow and store anyway.

micro-greens have definitely gained a solid foothold for me this year as well. people are slow to try them but once they do they are hooked.