We’re Back at It, Rockwall!
The Rockwall Farmers Market kicks off every year in early May, and it’s always a big moment for us since we’ve been on our market hustle in Denton every weekend already, but a second Saturday market means it’s time to do double duty!
Seven seasons in, here’s something we can tell you for sure: the farmers market is not a hobby, and we say that with love.
By the time we’re set up under the tent on Saturday, we’ve already put eight hours into the booth on Friday: harvesting, bunching, filling buckets, tying twine on mason jars, stickering sleeves, washing the tablecloths, washing the eggs, packing the cooler, packing our breakfast, loading the van.
Then, arranging for someone to come harvest lilies and sunflowers while we’re gone, because lilies and sunflowers do not care that we have a market, and they need to be cut at the right bloom stage. There is nothing quite as annoying as getting home depleted on Saturday afternoon to find a tunnel of hundreds of lilies in full bloom and a huge row of sunflowers that need to come down before the cucumber beetles find the petals first.
We’re up before dawn on Saturday to get on the road, setting up the tent and unloading the van and getting the booth right, and then we stand in whatever weather Texas hands us for the next four hours.
Sometimes someone asks if we picked the flowers on the side of the road. We used to get a little offended. Now we just chuckle and tell them the truth: we grew them.
It’s not necessarily a fun way to spend a Saturday. But it is, by far, the best way we’ve found to spend one.
Because the market is also the regulars who became friends. The babies we saw in your bellies last season who are walking now. The kids who were in kindergarten when we started and are somehow now in fifth grade.
It’s the breeze off the lake when it shows up, and our perfect corner spot in the shade. It’s the pets and the parrots and the rescue dogs up for adoption. It’s the few minutes we steal mid-morning to make our rounds and spend as much as we make.
It is, in the end, the whole reason we do this: a flower we nurtured from seed going home with someone who, hopefully, will get even an ounce of the joy from it that we got out of growing it.
See you under the tent!