Letters to Ann

Dear Ann,

You will know where I will be on the third Sunday of every month: at the Fennels Bay Market with my little jars of Curried Zucchinni Relish & I am having a ball.

Incidentally, I said this to a friend of mine over the phone recently & she said “Oh my, I thought you were going to say you were having an affair”! I assured her that after a fifty eight year affair with my husband that I will not go astray as I am enjoying myself too much & very content with life as it is.

So in February I took myself off to my favourite market early in the morning, complete with my new tables, pretty tablecloth & my very new concertina gazebo that I was dying to see put up.

I asked Mr. Lions Club man when I booked in if some of the men could help me, so the good man took me to my site where he had phoned for two men to erect my gazebo. It was done in minutes. It’s so easy with legs to stand on while the concertina part unfolds out; the roof placed on the top & buttons to press which pushes it up to its full height.

This all means that I can sleep in an extra half hour on market mornings & leave home at 6:30 a.m. instead of 6 a.m.

It doesn’t take me long to unpack. By now I am quite adept at that, which is just as well as buyers come around looking soon after 7 a.m. I was selling produce well before the appointed time to start.

It’s quite interesting as I had forty five different sized jars of relish in bigger jars than last month, which looks good although the jars are not prettied up at all. I just leave them plain.

It’s interesting – as I sit there giving out the tastings – to watch how the supply dwindles, usually just one by one. Although one very enthusiastic customer came along with a friend & when she tasted the relish she fell for it, & said it was to die for! She immediately grabbed the biggest jar ($12), then grabbed the next biggest, ($9), then an $8 jar, which she said was one for the office, one for Mum & one for herself!

That has been my biggest sale so far & I am sure she will be back next month. So I am slowly & quietly building up a good clientele.

Dawn’s relish on sale at Fennels Bay Market. 16/4/2017

One of the ingredients in the relish is capsicums (a.k.a. bell peppers) which are really expensive in the super markets, so when the lady in the stall next to me said that the fruit & vege man had them for $1 I dashed over to get a dozen, as this is a great saving.

They are usually $9 per kilo at the super market, which is nothing short of outrageous, but I can’t be bothered shopping anywhere else unless its in front of me as this was. At least it wasn’t the Chinese lady!

When I went to purchase, the gentleman also had tomatoes for $5 per case with 10 kilos in each case. Wow that’s a bit different to paying $7 per kilo! I went a little mad. I bought six cases & the gentleman carried them over & put them in my car for me. I knew I could use three cases & I had plans for the other three.

I make a delicious relish & David makes a super Tomato Chutney. He grows his own tomatoes & last year he made 25 kilos of his chutney, which gets great accolades to all that he gives it to. They yearn for more & I think he practically supplies all his street as well as family.

When Philip & Greg went home they were well equipped with some rather large jars of David’s chutney in their baggage. So much so that they almost had to leave behind the two pairs of binoculars I had given them for Christmas because of excess baggage, so you can see how popular David’s relish is!

However, this season David’s tomato plants have done ‘diddly squat’, they just didn’t come into fruit & David had been waiting for the price of tomatoes to decrease to a reasonable price so that he could make his relish.

So that Sunday night I went up for dinner as usual. When I went inside I told David I had something in the car for him, but it was too heavy for me to carry. So, of course he said he would get it for me & we walked back up to the car together.

When I opened the car boot & he saw I had three cases of tomatoes for him he put his head back grinning, put his arm around me & said “Only my Mum would buy me three cases of tomatoes!” I left him that night knowing what he would be doing other than attending to his roofing business for the following week!

As for me, I wasn’t rushed at the market. There was just a steady flow until one & half hours before the market was due to end. It seemed that all of a sudden I only had one bottle left.

The lady next to me who had already had bought a jar & was eating it on the sandwiches she had brought with her said “I will take that last jar & then you can go home.”

So I drove myself out of the throng of stall holders, onto the open road heading for Michele’s patisserie where I had my usual lunch about two hours earlier than expected.

While munching away I made a list of ingredients I would need for my next market. I already had tomatoes & capsicums & left there with a trolley load of everything else I needed.

The lass at the checkout asked was I making pickles, so I put her right on what I was about to make so she ordered a bottle before I left. I don’t think that’s too bad selling produce to the supermarket staff as I did with the Christmas Puddings. I learnt a lot about selling when in Tupperware & I don’t let an opportunity pass me by.

So by the time I went up to David’s for dinner that night, I had shopped, chopped, weighed & was prepared to make two batches next morning, which I did. I now had sixteen jars ready for next month’s market.

Then I went to have lunch with Pat & Judy at 11.30 a.m., which is a ritual each Monday. I don’t get home until 3 p.m. I had a batch of relish to take to Prime Timers on Tuesday morning.

I continued chopping, weighing, cooking & labelling for the rest of the week. I had made ten batches by the following weekend & was almost out of jars. However, my good Prime Timer pals have sent me in two cartons of jars already, so it all looks good.

I am very pleased with my new hobby, my new gazebo, my sales & my production, but more importantly is the fact I just feel so healthy & very content with life itself.

I love you. Dawn X O X O

Dear Ann,

I was hooked, lock, stock & barrel. I think markets are going to be the boon of my life until I leave the planet or until God ceases to give me the energy to continue.

Along the way I have learnt quite a lot. To start with it was the fundamentals I needed to learn. These were to have a cover in case of inclement weather & I needed jars to put relish in because now I was into the throes of this new hobby I was going to run out of jars very quickly. I will tell you the story of jars first.

Last year when taking a batch of relish to Prime Timers each month I soon ran out of jars, just any old ordinary jars that most people put in the recycling bin. I put out an SOS via Joan, our leader, who announced my dilemma to all & sundry, asking our members if they would bring any unwanted jars to the monthly meetings for me.

Well they love the relish, so I got the jars – some hundreds of them, all shapes & sizes. Just before the end of last year I had to ask Joan to put out another SOS to thank them all for their support, but as I had four hundred & thirty four jars housed on every available shelf to please stop!

So they did. Then with the advent of needing them for markets, after two months I had to put out another SOS via Joan, to please bring them again as Dawn desperately needs jars! I could see myself running out of them within the next month as I am currently using at least seventy a month & I don’t want to have to buy jars. I am hoping the members will respond as they did before so that’s the first part of this story.

With gazebos, I was lucky last year as I didn’t have one but the weather was kind. However, that won’t always be the case. With the Christmas puddings particularly, that was sheer luck & I could see it was necessary to have cover.

My lovely lass, Sue, who was doing my housework almost weekly at that stage, brought along her gazebo to lend to me, but it wouldn’t fit in the car. She suggested I take my car & go to the home hardware store & say that if they had a gazeo that would fit in it I would buy it on the spot.

This I did & the day before the Warners Bay Market was held last year I mentioned to the organiser, Roslyn, who was going to make sure I had cover under a tree, that I had bought a gazebo.

She happened to say that she hoped it wasn’t one of those that ‘a’ had to fit into ‘b’ & ‘c’ into ‘d’ & so on with masses of poles to fit into one another because she had seen the menfolk at the council putting them up before & they were a real hassle.

Well, you guessed it, when I asked them to put it up at the market the next day, that is exactly what I had! Finally, the stall holder next to me said that he had better come & help them as he was very familiar with that type of gazebo & knew what a problem they could be.

He got it done & I had good cover that day. Needless to say the nice lad did not go home empty handed for his help.

That particular day as I was leaving, an elderly gentleman & a stall holder from way back gave me the name of the gazebo that was the best & easiest to erect. He even spent time showing me how it was done.

I went off armed with the information thanking him for his help. This information eventuated in Philip taking me to the Boating, Camping & Fishing stores that had been suggested. We did this on the way home from Line Dancing as I had my next & last market for the year the following day.

The first store we went to didn’t have any in stock & said they thought the manufacturers were no longer making the particular one I needed, but he was kind enough to suggest another store further on. When we called there the salesman did not have that particular one either, but showed us another which he stated was similar. I was very happy to get it & it was sitting on the back seat of my car as I happily drove off.

My happiness on that score was short lived as, when the Lions Club men went to set it up for me, I realised that I would never be able to manage this one either. I am always going to need help in putting a gazebo up, but I don’t want it to be too much of a difficult job when others are helping me.

I was really disappointed with making another mistake with my second choice, so David came to my rescue after my first market day this year. He looked it up on line & found that it was available at a huge hardware store. Indeed the most popular one in our State, which was also near to where I live.

I took myself there the next day. I should have gone there in the first place as they not only had the one recommended for me in stock, but they also had one erected in the store. The salesman took me through its advantages at length as I didn’t want to make a third mistake.

I was just so pleased at having the right one at last & could scarcely wait to see it up & operating.

I decided it won’t just be relish I would be selling at the market. Sometime in the future I will have two gazebos on sale at very good prices, as both have only been used once.

That’s the story of the gazebos. In addition I bought two new folding tables instead of old fashioned card tables that are a thing of the past.  Now I am starting to look like & feel like a real professional stall holder with all the right equipment! Look out Fennels Bay, here I come!

God Bless & Fond Love. Dawn X O X O