Gratitude

We give thanks to the many people who continually step up to help us with our business endeavor. While we work hard to shift gears and build a successful business, we constantly receive encouragement from the universe, telling us we must be on the right path. Frequently, during the past several months we have been stricken with terror and wondered "How the f#*# are we going to make it?!" And each time, we receive a sign and some saving grace. For example, our friend/neighbor tipped us off to a research study we might qualify for. We signed up and were guaranteed to be paid, as long as we showed up. So we went to this study about retirement planning, and 10 minutes into it, the researchers knew retirement was pretty far down the list of our current priorities, so they set us free, but said that one of the researchers was interested in our business and would be willing to give us some free business counsel. So we got some cash AND some great free business advice!
In the past week, we owe a huge thanks to Victoria for working on our website and tipping us to the research, Gari for doing photography, Amy for counsel, the nice folks at Fieldwork Seattle, Mea for asking for a cake, MaryDell for babysitting, Sarah for one more shift, Scary and Laura for babysitting, T.D. empire for employment, Jeff Miller for the pep talk, Otto GardenCare for employment, farmers for good food....That's just this week.

You can't judge a book.....

A recurring theme this week seems to be that wise old adage, "You can't judge a book by its cover". Sometimes, I approach a table at my waitressing job, I hear a certain accent and I cringe, that nasty little voice in my head muttering things about food ignorance, bad tippers, BUT I ignore it, remember that everyone has their story, and try to learn what I can from this encounter.
In the food service industry, I am constantly amazed by the interesting people who work in restaurants. Lots of people work restaurants because they offer decent cash and fairly short hours. Off the top of my head, I can think of a school principal, a teacher, a film maker, a photographer, a former monk, an accountant, all working in one restaurant.
Then, today I was listening to talk radio and they were interviewing Washington farmers, and this one farmer was telling a familiar story about how farmer's sons left the farm, got college educations, then ended up coming back to work the farm. So out in the rural countryside, you have these scruffy looking guys driving dirty pick-up trucks, managing dusty fields with law degrees, or economic degrees, or anything else under the sun. Just another reason to get to know your friendly market farmer!
Then there is the uglier side of this, the "lipstick on a pig" side. Dylan occasionally works catering for a big fancy catering company. They have a beautiful web site, lots of bling, a fat marketing campaign. They were serving a party "Kobe beef sliders", but these were actually pre-formed, industrial beef from a large foodservice warehouse. YUCK! This campany promotes themselves as organic and local and all the buzz, but time and time again, they just buy inferior product from mass distributors. WHY? Because it's cheap and easy. When you're busy with lots of marketing and drumming up business to support your bling, not much money or time leftover for the food. SO The company with the snazziest website is not necessarily the company with the best food.

Stayin' Alive

Time to shift gears. I have a great photo in the camera, but can't find the connector cable to upload it. Anyway, we're figuring out how GreenGo can pay its own bills through the winter without markets. Dylan is painting and landscaping and catering. Heidi is waitressing more and looking for a "fuller time" job. Cypress is begging to go to school.
August was a terrible financial month for us..Money sucking Pioneer Days, Rainy weather, Late tax payment, Lame sales at Lake Forest due to a "Wal Mart" style food vendor.
YAAAARGH! On one hand, it's tempting to say, "well, clearly people will pay to eat industrial food, let's just buy the cheap stuff and make a big profit." But then we would not be doing the rigt thing.
I guess we need to accept that we can not make a living selling really good food at Farmer's Markets. Tough to swallow, but That's the bottom line.
So, we'll wrap it up, consider it a good education and social experiment, move on to catering, pay our debt and work smarter towards our next venture.

The Right Festival

We sure enjoyed the Blues for Food Fest this weekend. After the dismal loss at Lake City, we thought festivals would NOT be for us, but we did this one as it was a benefit for P-Patch, and we figured it would be our target demographic. Great music, great people, a fabulous setting at Magnuson Park's P-Patch. A lot of people worked very hard on this wonderful event for a great cause. Special thanks to Deb Rock and Cholo Willsin.

For Peas' Sake!

This cool, wet August weather had one benefit to our victory garden....more Peas! Here in late August, we were still harvesting big fat sweet snap peas! Our cherry tomatoes are ripening, our sunflowers are opening beautifully, we've got lots of nice herbs, a few pumpkins getting fat and beginning to ripen. Our victory garden has been a great success, now we are making plans to begin potting up the things we want to keep, ripping out the rest, and spreading all that rich garden soil around to plant wretched grass for our landlord. How can anyone think that plastic wrapped "food" from who knows where in the grocery store is preferable to growing your own real food? Grumble grumble sigh.
Anyway, the preparations begin to move to our own little slice of the American dream. Don't know where or how or when, just gotta believe and be open and ready, and I know for certain, the only grassy "lawn" we'll be maintaining will be for our animals to graze.