Sloppy Mess
There’s no need for a calendar to tell us that winter is here in all of her wild and unpredictable messiness. Maybe that’s why the season is always portrayed as female. When I was young, winter was Jadis of Narnia. Now we have Elsa from Frozen who isn’t as terrifying. If you’re a Bollywood fan, your ice queen is Rekha. How come winter can’t be as elegant as those royals? Instead of silks and fur I end up with insulated coveralls, wool, and fleece looking more like the Abominable Snow Man.
We are deep into the season of snow, ice, sleet, rain, and freezing temperatures. The market tries to make it a bit more tolerable by opening at 9:30 AM from January and February. This gives vendors a bigger window to safely make it to Bethesda in the event of inclement weather and if we’re lucky, let the temperatures rise a bit more. Please sit in your vehicle if you forget about winter hours, show up early and don’t want to queue in the cold.
Most of the perishable produce vendors have been at winter markets long enough they’ve developed a number of hacks to outsmart the cold. Those disposable hand warmers not only end up in our pockets, but in salad bins and taped to credit card processing equipment.
It’s the simple things that can make a bitter cold day more tolerable. You can spot the winter market veterans as they have some sort of mat to stand on insulating them from the icy cold blacktop. That same trick helps ward off heat in the summer, too. There’s portable propane heaters for the nastiest days. This is one of the reasons we ask that patrons not cut behind our stands. These contraptions are H O T and can easily burn anything that gets too close.
In addition to precipitation, winter brings lots of winds. This is when you’ll see many of your vendors going topless. If you identify your vendors by their tents, it’s time to pay attention for other ways to identify us. A few weeks ago a shopper asked if they could take a picture of me and my stand. “I’m having surgery and this is how I’m telling my spouse where I shop.” Their method worked flawlessly.
Several of the vendors must travel over the mountain to get to market. While it was mild and wet last weekend, there was 8” of snow and more in portions of Pennsylvania, northern Maryland, and West Virginia. If we can’t get our vehicles out of the driveway and on the road there’s not much more that can be done. Sometimes it’s not even about the travel. In extremely low temperatures (like extremely high temperatures) leaving the farm isn’t a wise choice, especially for those with livestock. Our farms comes first.
Farming in winter weather has its own set of challenges. Simply getting around at its least can put us in a grumpy mood and at its worst, be downright dangerous. Ice, snow, and mud all come with risks for slip & falls. Those torrential rains that had my phone beeping with flood watches from the National Weather Service, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management System and Alert Montgomery where then later replaced with High Wind Warnings. Farmers tend to pay attention to these details because we work outside regardless of the weather knowing the impact it has to snarl production. No one wants to see less food at the market because a greenhouse was flooded or lost its skin to the wind.
This is the North East and we know this happens every year. Some winters are mild and some slap us with a vengeance. Regardless of what gets doled out until the first signs of spring you can bet your farmers can handle it and keep everyone well fed even if the conditions are a sloppy mess.