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market-farming - Re: [market-farming digest] Roadside Stands

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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: [market-farming digest] Roadside Stands
  • Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 08:10:05 EDT


My stand could hardly be simpler or more portable!
My roadside stand is a little different.

A few years ago I lucked into a roadside farm business going out of business, and for $200 I bought an old horse-drawn flatbed wagon with a cute shingled roof. It cost me another $40 to get it hauled home on a trailer.

I might have been able to build an open roofed stand for $250, but only if I did it myself and I'm pretty useless with a hammer. For the first time in four years I have some work to do on the wagon -- it could use a fresh coat of paint.

When the garden is in full bloom and I can get some help, sometimes I roll it about 400' over to the corner of the four-acre agroforestry field that's closest to the auction house next door. I can push it by myself but somebody has to steer.

Out of the 200 or so people who eat, enough of them buy enough to make it worth a few minutes of pushing and on the next day it can go back to its regular location. I'm putting a down payment on a $120 12x10 sun shelter at K-Mart on Monday; the wagon will fit under it very nicely and I'm not doing any more open parking lot farm markets without a shelter, with or without the wagon.

The wagon is parked most of the time between the big maple tree and the weeping birch, the two of which create my half-acre "green room" next to the house and in front of the goat barn (about 100 feet down the hill). Those trees cool things down nicely on a hot day and it's all close enough to the garage to use evaporative cooling with wet sheets and a box fan. It's also close to the root cellar.

It's painted in bright green and white with a pink cardboard sort of "shingle" roof. And it's still in good enough shape that I can also put it in parades, though of course somebody sawed off the shaft to replace it with a connector for a tractor. That's okay, around here a tractor is just about as exotic as a horse these days. ;-(

Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm
Corning, NY

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  • Re: [market-farming digest] Roadside Stands, Dori Green, 05/13/2000

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