It’s a rare, cool, cloudy day here at the farmer’s market. “Tailgate row” is full of vendors and the produce is plentiful. In fact, Sylva’s Mill Street market this week is a virtual Horn of Plenty, a cornucopia of fresh foods, plants and related greenery. With local gardens and farms at the peak of their growing season, the only word that comes to mind to describe the plethora of product rolling into the market today is “bounty.”

Last week it was the Harleys parading by on Mill Street. This week it’s antique cars (old Chevys, Fords, Chryslers, Edsels ...) and the “god of gardens” has opened the flood gates. A couple of weeks ago it was the rain. This week it’s the produce that is pouring in. Eugene Reed from Worley Farms over in Whittier arrived this morning with his truckbed filled to overflowing with a hundred dozen ears of Silver Queen sweet corn — with the green shucks visible and blowing in the wind as he pulled into the lot.

Selling for the best deal in Western North Carolina at two dollars a dozen, customers have been hanging around his truck all morning like ants on sugar.

Bounty!

“I got up at six o’clock this morning to pick this corn,” Eugene says, wiping the sweat from his brow as he rakes his mound of corn toward the tail of the truck with a long-handled potato fork. “I couldn’t hardly see what I was pickin it was so dark at that hour. I’ve got to sell all this today, otherwise I’ll have to work all the rest of the day just putting it up! So, I’m selling it at a good price.” He stops talking long enough to sell three dozen ears, adding a gratuity of a few extra ears, to a young couple who walk away with big smiles — as if they can already taste the corn feast they will have at supper tonight.
Meanwhile, Neil Dawson has shown up with a big flatbed truck completely full of watermelons he’s grown over in a patch he farms in Webster. I’d always heard that you can’t grow watermelons up here in the mountains, but Neil has put an abrupt end to that fiction — with three different varieties of watermelon, all ripe, and ready to eat on the spot — which a couple of local children have already figured out as they make a mess of themselves and the pavement next to the big truck where they are noisily savoring the sweet, juicy fruit.

“There’s nothin’ to it,” says Neil when I ask him about growing melons in the mountains. “I’ve got a big open field over there in Webster that gets sun all day. All I did was plant the seeds, scatter a little 10/10/10 around the hills, and walk away.”

Bounty!

While everyone’s crowding around the Dawson’s green melon truck and the Worley Farms corn pile, Wilburn and Maxine Passmore from Ponderosa Farms over in the Green’s Creek community have arrived in their blue Buick which they have backed up to the sidewalk to reveal a trunk full of old-timey cornfield beans.

“We sold our good Jersey cow, and our new chickens ain’t a-layin right now,” says Wilburn, pushing his mountain fedora back a bit on his head. “So, we don’t have sweet butter or eggs for sale today, but we’ve got several bushels of these good old cornfield beans.” Immediately, there is a crowd and conversation going on around the back end of the Passmore car, and it’s like old-home week, with folks greeting each other like long lost friends and catching up with tales about weather and their lives.

Bounty!

Down the line a ways, Jim Parham and Mary Ellen Hammond have brought in their new crop of sourwood honey, and their display table is full of pint and quart jars glistening golden in the late-morning sun as young and old alike huddle under their open-air tent tasting the warm honey on fresh-baked bread. Fellow beekeeper and garlic guru David Starr from the Union Acres community in Whittier is on the scene today, and “bee talk” runs rampant outside the tent, while inside money changes hands.

Bounty!

Everywhere I look today there is an abundance of beautiful food and groups of folks crowded around talkin’ and tastin’ and buyin’. By 10:30 the Passmores have sold all their cornfield beans and are pulling out of the lot to return home to can beans. But just as soon as they’ve pulled out onto Mill Street, their vendor position is taken by the Whites from over in the Love’s Field community. With a big, broad-brimmed straw hat, Mrs. White is unpacking some of the most beautiful, big yellow tomatoes you’ve ever seen. Half-bushel baskets full of them. Bounty!

In no time she’s joined by 75-year-old Eulas McMahan who lives over on Green’s Creek, and they’re talking about tomatoes.

“I got the viniest tomatoes I’ve ever had,” says Eulas. “Why, there is so much vine this year that I’ve been pickin’ tomatoes off my roof!” Mrs. White smiles as I laugh and Eulas goes on.

“And I got tommy-toes, little red’uns and yeller‘uns everywhere. The little girl down the road likes to come over and look in my garden. The other day I caught her in there eatin’ them tommy-toes. Why, she was eatin’em afore they were ripe — eatin’em red and green, one after the other.”

And if all this wasn’t enough, toward the end of the morning I looked up from my lawn chair, which I had set out beside my truck to sit in, to see none other than the renowned Cherokee stone carver Amanda Crowe leaning up against the side of my truck and looking into the bed to see what I had left to sell.

“I like that rock,” she says, referring to a large piece of black granite I had sitting in the wheel well of my spare tire. “I’ll sell it to you,” I reply, smiling. “Everything’s for sale, here, today,” I tease.
“If that was soapstone, I’d buy it from you,” she says in earnestness.

I get up and walk around to the other side of the truck where she is leaning on the sideboard and ask her how she is doing.

“I’m looking for blueberries and sweet corn,” she says, eyeing Mary Jane Mrozkowski’s almost empty five-gallon blueberry bucket on a card table set up in the station next to mine as she reaches into her shirt pocket and pulls out a little, flat, plastic case and opens it to show me what’s inside. There are maybe a dozen miniature stone carvings of black bear cubs. Tiny in size, but done with precision and detail. Small signatures of her astonishing talent. Bounty!

It’s been that kind of day at the tailgate market — a load of liberality and largess, graciousness and easy pursestrings — with customers generously giving tips, and vendors pulling out of the parking lot with empty truck beds and money clips stretched to the limit. Eugene Reed’s hundred dozen ears of Silver Queen are already being shucked all over Jackson, Macon and Swain counties. Neil Dawson goes home with maybe a watermelon or two for him and his wife, Peggy, for lunch. The Passmore’s cornfield beans will be snapped and cooked tonight for dinner and canned tomorrow in a dozen pressure canners across the county despite the August mid-day heat. And the bees over in Whittier and Bryson City will be back at work filling the comb cells robbed of their honey last week.

Bounty ... here at the tailgate market where the conversation and the tales are as puzzling as they are endless, and as interesting as the food is good.

 

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The Smoky Mountain News