What goes up, must come down

Gazeb-it or not, we're back!

A few hours after setting up the farmers' market this morning, we were back at a more palatable time to help set down. This morning had not only warmed our biceps up, but also trained us to perfect our gazebo managing and barrier carrying techniques.

After carrying the barriers along the road back to their original stacking location, we offered up our gazebo-downing skills to stallholders, bantering with those that we'd met this morning and very much getting into the market traders' spirit. Some stall holders found us other tasks, requesting us to take produce to other sellers. "Sure, leave it to us"...

"Are you the Olive Man? These are from the Tomato Man for you. The parking space is blocked as the Gin Ladies are loading the van": quite a sentence to overhear, definitely one for the Overheard at a GoodGym Farmers' Market Community Mission collection.

We made sure to pop by to Steve and Masie at the chilli sauce stall, catching up with the youngest trader (10!) and her dad, and enthusiastically helped them close down - and were very generously given a bottle of chilli sauce each to take away as a thank you - thank you!

What a kalamata!

After passing on Tomato Man's tomatoes to Olive Man, we formed a human chain, helping to load up Olive Man's van with various barrels of olives, humongous amounts of hummus, pesto, stuffed vine leaves - all things yummy! We also slightly interrogated him about the GIANT garlic (see photo evidence, including with Nicky's hand for scale!) - turns out they're from Spain and the cloves are more pungent than the supermarket ones that he believes are from China. Market days are quite the learning opportunity!

We then stopped by to help Eleanor, the savoury muffin creator, hearing how she bakes the muffins the night before the markets, preps during the week, and manages to fit in another job too! She greeted us with a bag of her muffins for us to enjoy after as a thank you, which gave us even more enthusiasm to help her pack away and de-gazebo. Thanks Eleanor!

We headed off with the market tidied away, munching on muffins and with chilli sauce bottles in our pockets. Looking forward to next month already!