Cameron County Farmers Market
I've already introduced you to all the vendors that will be at this weekend's market, so I guess it’s our turn now!
For those that don’t know us, I'm Valerie van Breugel, my husband is Steve VanEerden and together (with our dog, Jake!) we are Calder Wilds.
We live just outside of Emporium and enjoy a largely living-of-the-land lifestyle, growing our own fruits and vegetables, foraging for wild mushrooms and, more recently, starting our own mushroom farm.
Although I was mainly concentrating on starting and organizing the farmers market last year, we quite naturally started selling some of our own fresh produce as well. This year we wanted to up our game as vendors and extended our vegetable patch considerably so that we could grow more produce for the market. It was a lot of hard work, but we now have about 5,000 sq feet of beds and are growing a variety of produce including leafy greens (spinach, kale, Swiss chard and lettuce), brassicas (Brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli), beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, a selection of herbs and much more. We are planning on bringing all these to market to share with the community as soon as they’re ready to harvest!
We are also experimenting with various ways of growing mushrooms, utilizing logs and straw bales to find the most productive methods. We have been having more success with the logs and had an abundance of shiitakes popping up last week. We are also growing 5 different types of oyster mushrooms, chestnut mushrooms and Lions Mane. It’s been a fun experiment and we hope to fine tune and expand our skills in this area over the next couple of years so that we can start supplying a variety of interesting mushrooms to Cameron County!
We will be at the market this Saturday, 24th June, 9am to 12pm so pop by to see us and the other vendors who will be braving the rain under a big tent in the Emporium Town Square!
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