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October 28, 2008

Festhalle season ends Thursday

By Trent Moore

Staff Writer

As the leaves turn from green to brown and the seasons begin to change, the growing season for the local Festhalle Market Platz farmers market is also coming to an end Thursday, with the final day of operation from 12 p.m. - 6 p.m.

“It’s been a good year,” local Hanceville farmer RosaLee Gibbs said. “Overall it’s been a really good season.”

Fellow Festhalle regular from the Springhill community, Kenneth Jones, echoed those sentiments.

“Oh yeah, we’ve had a really great year,” he said.

Festhalle Market Platz Manager Jimmy Simms agreed.

“It’s been fantastic,” he said. “We’ve had an amazing year. We had high hopes coming into the second year that it would be better than the first, and we haven’t been disappointed.”

Simms said the number of vendors that have sold at the market this season has almost doubled since last year.

“We’ve had quite a few more vendors and customers than last year,” he said. “Last year we had a total of 37 different vendors, and this year we had 60 total. That’s quite a jump.”

The average number of vendors also improved since last season, with an average of 14 vendors this year, compared to 10 last season.

“Plus, we were open more days this season, so we’re doing really well,” he said.

Simms added that the market was open more this season, which was also a successful experiment.

“We opened in April for nursery stock and bedding plants,” he said. “That went over well, and we plan to do it again next year.”

Feedback from the community has also been positive, Simms added.

“We do surveys with folks and always ask them what we can do different,” he said. “Folks usually just tell us to keeping doing more of the same.”

Simms said the market has improved greatly, considering the obstacles faced in its first season of operation.

“We started in April 2007 with the late freeze that devastated the fruit crop,” he said. “Not to mention we were engrossed in one of the worst droughts we’ve ever seen. But, farmers continued to use well water and things of that nature, and overcame that.”

With an eye to the future, Simms said he anticipates the 2009 season to be even better.

“We have even higher hopes for next year,” he said. “We’re already planning a bigger and better Strawberry Day kickoff event.”

The market will reopen on the first Thursday in April 2009 for seven weeks to sell nursery stock, with the regular season starting on the last Saturday in May.



‰ Trent Moore can be reached by e-mail at trentm@cullmantimes.com, or by telephone at 734-2131, ext. 225.

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