Salad mix

• The mesclun craze just doesn’t seem to bottom out. The more farmers are getting into it, the more customers, and each farmer seems to have a different mix with each one tasting different.
• One interesting variation on mesclun mixes is a farmer here selling mixed bunches of vegetables, rainbow mixes of radishes or chiogga beets.
• Due to the competition, we give our mixes names and we offer different ‘flavors’ with different ingredients.
• My salad mix has large leaves instead of baby leaves and I can sell my product for 50 percent cheaper. I found a niche of people willing to pay $3 a pound for salad mix instead of $6 a pound.
• We sell head lettuce with roots on (washed) as ‘live.’

Herbs

• Herbs are a great farmers’ market niche item, and also lend themselves to great value-added items like herbal vinegars.

Ethnic

• It’s a combination of more ethnic buyers coming to the market and other people liking the ethnic foods.

Organic items

• There’s a trend toward organic here (New York) at the markets. People are still shopping primarily for price on the East Coast, though, and only a certain percentage of people will pay extra for organics.
• The consumers are more educated now. People are starting to take care of themselves a lot better and they’re searching for organic.

Fresh flowers

• There’s a lot of competition in the market for flowers. You have to stay ahead of the competition. This means reading a lot of flower and gardening magazines and being a member of the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers.

Also mentioned:

• Products for canning, vegetable seedlings, bedding plants, maple syrup, nuts, baby vegetables and greenhouse tomatoes.