What a great start!

Opening day was terrific! We had 24 vendors, two musical performances, and steady crowds all day long. This is what we had in mind for a downtown farmers market!

Stephanie Salter wrote a great piece in Sunday's Tribune-Star about the opening, and her enthusiasm was shared throughout the crowd on Saturday.

And the growth in vendors (about double) was matched by the number of customers. I saw lots of news faces, and several of our vendors sold out of everything they brought. A few told me that they had their best sales day ever!

We have a new bakery - Marta Skelton's Harvest Bakery. She specializes in sourdough bread - and has captured her own wild yeast strain. So her bread is the essence of Terre Haute - as much as San Francisco's famous bread is unique to that place.

Nathan Paul-Bonham played guitar for nearly three hours! With a break to buy a battery-powered Fender amp, he came back to fill the market air with music.

During his break, the Women of Erin assembled, and graced the market with their ever-popular Celtic music.

I served about 100 cones of free homemade strawberry and blueberry ice cream, then some Edy's after the good-stuff was gone. It was pretty hard to keep the ice-cream from turning to soup in the heat, so this will have to be an occasional venture.

Next week - the Altrusa Buck-book-booth opens with their first monthly appearance. They will have books that you can buy for just one dollar, or you can bring a book to trade. (Donations of books or cash are always welcome, and the funds support local literacy efforts.) Children can pick up a free book too.

One of our new advertising tools/give-aways is a business-card-sized magnet with the familiar red-gold-and-black DFM banner. It is a great reminder to keep on your refrigerator - and apparently, very popular. I started with 1,000 on Thursday, and have given away all but about 75! I think we'll need to order some more.

Look for yard signs to begin popping up around town, too. We will distribute them to our vendors, who will install them along roadsides early on Saturday mornings on their way to market, then pick them up on the way home. Distributed around the community, the signs will be a timely reminder to drivers that Saturday morning is the time to get to the Farmers Market.