City Market, Healthy Living, Nhat Long & and the Woman from Wales

Pretty intriguing title I thought. Today I cut a decent portion of what remains of our Napa cabbage to sell to Nhat Long, an Old North End Asian Market. We are selling it (and a bit of baby bok choi) for about half the price we would to City Market or Healthy Living. Why are we doing it? Because neither store is buying as they were in the summer. It seems that the local fever is dying a bit, though there could be other reasons too. We are not certified organic, and perhaps there is only enough shelf space for one kind of Napa (and asian braising greens which we also had been selling them), but I must admit, looking at the organic option from Quebec, I thought "that stuff looks like cr-p." Given the reputation of the Intervale (it is pretty well known around town that everything grown down there must be grown organically even if not certified) and the markets continual touting of local, I was surprised when they didn't take the option to get local produce. Other reasons, to be fair, could be that these markets simply don't have the time or staff that they do during the Summer Season to deal with the smaller farms (they still buy from Digger's and Arethusa). Maybe there is a bit of veggie fatigue on the part of the public.


All the same it is pretty fun to go into the markets (both African and Asian) on North Street, a different shopping experience to say the least, and as you know we at Open Heart like different.

The woman from Wales was here in America on a grant from her country to learn more about CSA structures, which I learned to my surprise aren't as well established as they are here. Without rambling on endlessly, I will say that through our long talk I kinda figured out we are certainly on the verge of a farming-economic change if not revolution: changes seem to range from about 50 different CSA structures, including the mega CSA of multiple possibly even mono-cropping farms, which I guess would be more of just a box-scheme, but could make it with people unexamined as a "CSA." That wouldn't necessarily be the end of small farms, especially since local might only be becoming more of a necessity, not just a few month marketing thing.