Produce, anyone?

I played a show at the Logan Gardeners' Market on Saturday morning. It was a lot of fun and a great environment to play in. For those of you not familiar with the market, a bunch of local gardeners, craftsman, artists, and other vendors all set up shop in a local park and then people browse through all day buying produce, bread, lemonade, flowers, clothing, pictures, artwork, etc. And they typically have some sort of musician or band playing in the background. Well, Staurday was the first time I was scheduled to play, and I had a really good time. I sold a few CDs and got a few bucks in tips, so I was happy. But on top of that, the person in charge of setting up musicians for the market, Skip Astro (what an awesome name, huh?), had mentioned to me when we set up the dates I would play at the fest that, while they couldn't pay musicians anything for playing, they "pay in produce." I knew Skip had a table at the market and I figured he meant that he would give me a couple bucks worth of lettuce or spinach or something. But when I saw him toting a big blue rubbermaid container throughout the market while I was playing, I started to wonder if he was gathering my payment of produce, which I soon found out is exactly what he was doing. So I ended up coming home with three loaves of specialty bread, two pounds of cherries, some garlic, onions, scallions, lettuce, and more beets and beet greens then I have ever seen in one place at one time (I guess beets are in season!). I mean, what exactly do you do with beets, anyway? If anyone has any ideas, please enlighten us.

And on top of the gardeners' market, we also went to our own garden on Sunday and came away with a ton of lettuce and spinach, some snap peas, and some other peas. So we have enough produce for a little while. Hopefully we can get through most of it before it starts going bad. It looks like we're eating salads every meal for the next couple of weeks at least. :-)

And one final note about playing at the gardeners' market. In between sets, I got appoached from a guy who wanted me to play at the downtown street festival this week for $25/hour. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. So if you're going to be in Logan this Friday from 1-4pm, come check it out!