My wife has been telling me for years about a woman who lives on a double lot near us and sells vegetables.
Aside from the fact that she grows the best tomatoes and sweet corn on the planet, she also doesn’t charge much at all for her produce. Too, she bottles tomatoes, apple sauce, and homemade salsa and pesto. Her daughter-in-law helps with the production required, amounting to hundreds of bottles during the high season. Together they make apple crisp, German chocolate cake, and other pastries—but only if you’re lucky enough to be there when they’re for sale.
There’s no cash register at Betty’s, only a cash box sitting on the counter in her garage next to the carrots. That’s where you pay. You see, she’s not outside all the time, so she puts a price on each vegetable picked that day. You simply put the money in the cash box and take change if you don’t have the exact amount. As her son says, “Between people taking too much or too little, it probably all evens itself out.”
Has she been filched a few times? “Oh yes”, she says, “but they probably needed it more than I did. People have to feed their families, you know.”
We visited her oasis over the weekend. Time’s running short as the winds start to blow a little colder, and the ground will be bitten by frost one of these nights.
We drove up to a group of swarthy young lads pushing apples into a grinder of some sort. There was Betty, her daughter-in-law, and three sons mushing apples for crisp, a new concoction the daughter urged us to try. Characteristically, she handed over a whole tin to take home and sample. We asked how much? She said, “You’ll be my guinea pigs, let me know what you think.” I can tell you it was delicious-o.
Betty grows a ton of vegetables in her garden, certainly enough to keep the surrounding neighborhoods fed. She also has an area for some kids who tend to their little patch of heaven. These are special-needs kids, and the lessons are priceless, I assume.
Being a business person, I thought the world needs this food—and if people knew who and where it came from they’d buy it, à la the old days when everyone grew their own and jammed it in Mason jars for the winter. Yes, it’s great organic business.
But then why ruin a good and wholesome thing by trying to monetize it?
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