Market News

We’ve gotten some new customers this summer so I thought I’d give you a summary of how The Cumming Harvest works. Those of you who have been with us during these last 5 years probably already know all this, but I’ll try to keep it interesting for you too.

TCH (The Cumming Harvest) is best thought of like a traditional farmers market, because except for the lack of tents and tables, that’s very much how we operate. The growers are putting their own items up for sale directly to you, at prices and quantities they have set. The market volunteers and I are here to make sure it all happens smoothly, but the growers are selling their products directly to you. Growers do have to apply to sell through the market, and I personally approve each of them before they list their products. Here’s a summary of the standards we have set:

• All growers must use sustainable practices and never use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides.
• All growers can only sell what they themselves have grown
• All growers must be from about 100 miles of Cumming, GA
• All animals raised for meat or eggs must be pastured
• Handicrafts must be made primarily from items produced or gathered on the farm
• Prepared foods must use organic ingredients and locally grown ingredients if at all possible and be prepared in a certified kitchen
• All proper licenses, when required by law, must be obtained

When I’ve turned down requests to sell through TCH, the items clearly broke one or more of those standards. There are a few edge cases that I take on a case by case basis, such as coffee. In cases like that, we set the standards as strict as we can. With coffee, for example, the beans must be sustainably grown, they must be roasted locally, and the roaster must have a direct business relationship with the farm that grew the beans.

So, the growers list their available products and set their prices. For most all of the products, they do this before they’ve harvested the items, so they have to estimate how much they will actually have. They’ve gotten pretty good at this guess, but it is a guess, and the unpredictable nature of farming means they may have far less than they thought (thanks to deer, a hail storm, etc.) or they may have far more than they thought (a nice rain can double the growth of lettuce overnight, for example). Most of them are conservative with their estimates, and so they let you continue to order even if they’ve already sold more than they guessed they’d have. That’s why popular items may have a quantity in the negatives when you look at the listings. The system will still let you order on the chance that they’ll actually have enough, but you’ll get warnings along the way that you’re taking a gamble.

I do not collect items from the farms, and do not know myself until Saturday morning what the growers were able to harvest and bring in. The growers do have each other’s contact information, so if one grower is short and another has a surplus, they may arrange with each other to get all the orders filled, but in general, if a grower cannot fill an order for something, they’ll remove that ordered item and you’ll see a comment on your invoice indicating that. Since I’m not a middle-man, I can’t arrange for substitutions myself.

When the growers bring in the items you ordered on Saturday morning, packaged and labelled with your name, I pay them on your behalf out of our shared cash box during the hour before we open the market for their sales. Then, you arrive and pay into the cashbox for your order. We deposit the money you pay (via cash, check, or credit) into our bank account so it will be there when we write checks. As explained elsewhere on the website, you are really ordering directly from and paying the growers yourself, but our shared cashbox system makes things convenient for you and them. (Imagine if you ordered from ten growers having to write ten checks when you picked up your items!) This shared cashbox system does mean that if you place an order and then never arrive to pick it up, we’re left holding the bag. For that reason, you are responsible for paying for orders not picked up, and that amount is automatically added on to your next order for your convenience. We do accept credit card payments on the website, and many customers take advantage of that and skip the pay table. The cards don’t actually get charged until after pickups on Saturday, so your charge will reflect any adjustments that had to get made along the way.

For a number of legal reasons, TCH never takes possession of your ordered items. We don’t buy them from the growers and resell them to you, nor do we repackage them in any way. The growers drop off your items for you, and you arrive and pick them up. The market volunteers facilitate that happening. We start calling those who haven’t arrived by 11:30, and quite often we just get answering machines and voice mail.

There are some things you can do to insure you won’t get charged for things you didn’t come get:

1. If you know prior to Thursday at 8pm that you won’t be able to come get your order or send someone in your place, send me an email and I will cancel your order.
2. If you find out later that you can’t come, send me an email. So long as I know before market begins, I can put the things you ordered on the “extras” table, and your fellow customers will almost certainly buy them for you.
3. If you discover Saturday while we’re at market that you can’t arrive, give me a call at 404-702-2601. I’ll put your items on the “extras” table, and if they sell, you’ll be off the hook.
4. If you have a cell phone, make sure that number is the number on your account. You can go to the “Your Account” page on the website to be sure. If you’re out and about and I get your home phone or your work phone, no one gets helped.

Finally, ours is a paperless system, so we do not have paper receipts for you when you pick up your order. An electronic receipt is generated, though, and can be found on the website. Go to the “Your Account” page, view your order history, and you’ll see an invoice for each order. By 8am on Saturday, it will show what we expect to have for you that day. After we fill your order, it will show exactly what we packed for you, and what, if anything, was missing. You can view that at any time, even years from now. If we didn’t get you something we should have, or if anything you got was of unacceptable quality, please contact me ASAP. I’ll share the problem with the grower so we can insure it won’t happen again. If you’re logged into the site, most of the growers have their contact info on their profile page (off the “Our Growers” page), so you can contact them directly if you choose.

If you have any questions, concerns, complaints, or even complements, please send them my way!
Thanks so much for your support! Suzanne

Grower Updates

I’m sorry to say we’ve lost our butter source, Emanuel and Rachel King have sold their cows and decided to take a break from the dairy business. Emanuel has given me another contact to try and I’ll let you know as soon as I get something worked out.

COMING SOON Doug and Melissa Resetarits of Doug’s Wild Alaska Salmon are back from fishing. Look for a new shipment of sockeye salmon coming in very soon.

Upcoming Events Around Town

Thursday, September 24, 2015 – 7:00pm
Roswell Chapter Meeting – WAPF Kitchen Tour
http://www.atlantarealfood.com/p/events.html

My kitchen is not very pretty (needs some serious updating) but many of you have asked for a peak inside my refrigerator and pantry to see what a Weston A. Price kitchen looks like. I will share with you my personal list of pantry staples, talk about where I buy them, and show you which tools/appliances I use most.

Your Account

FREE MEMBERSHIP You can now waive your membership fee of $25 just by signing up to volunteer one full Saturday morning, 8:30am-12:30pm. It’s fun and rewarding to experience “behind the scenes” of our locally grown market. Volunteers greet farmers and customers, organize food delivery and pick up, and check-out customer orders using a ipad. Check out this online sign up sheet to find an opening. http://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090d4baca92fa13-thecumming

UPDATE CONTACT With all the hustle and bustle of back-to-school and new routines, it’s easy to forget things like picking up your TCH order. Remember that we can’t keep your items past 12pm, and we’ll try contacting you any way we know how to make sure you get what you ordered. Now’s a great time to check the phone number on your account to make sure it’s a number I can reach you at 11:45am on a Saturday. I start calling everyone who hasn’t picked up yet then, and will keep trying to reach you until 12pm, when we have to pack it all up. I hate seeing people’s food go somewhere else, and having a good phone number on your account is the best way to keep that from happening.

DELIVERY We are postponing Vickery pick up and delivery in September.

We thank you for your interest and support of our efforts to bring you the healthiest, the freshest and the most delicious locally-produced foods possible!