After a year doing the Winfield Farmers’ Market, they started a French Market in Wheaton. Myself, Ari’s Flowers and about a dozen other vendors, helped get that market rolling. This began the farmer’s market era. From the late ‘90s to about 2010, I spent my summers on an absolutely ridiculous schedule—six markets in five days. Sundays in Mount Prospect, Saturdays at the Wheaton French Market, Wednesdays in Winfield, Fridays split between Schaumburg and Elk Grove, and occasional Thursdays in DeKalb. Mondays and Tuesdays were my “days off,” which mostly meant drying herbs, blending mixes, and questioning my life choices.
Of course, this was before I owned a digital camera, so there is virtually no proof that any of this actually happened. No neatly curated Instagram posts, no throwback photos—just my exhausted memories and a lingering aversion to pop-up tents.
This is my mom, my original packaging and my 5 pound hand-painted wooden sign.
Speaking of pop-up tents, let’s talk about rain—because nothing makes a farmer’s market not fun like a storm. One Friday, after a wonderful morning in Schaumburg, we set up in Elk Grove, watching some suspicious clouds roll in. At first, we optimistically assumed the rain would pass. Instead, the skies opened up in a torrential downpour that promptly took out our neighbor’s tent and forced us to take shelter in the Chevy Suburban, where we waited out the worst of it.
Once the rain slowed, we went back to take down our tent and shelves, having wisely already rescued the herbs. But that’s when we learned an important lesson: salt blocks make terrible tent weights. Turns out, they melt in heavy rain. Not only did our weights completely dissolve, but the salt proceeded to eat away at the aluminum legs of our tent. So there we were—soaked, laughing at our own misfortune, and left with a tent that looked like it had been through battle. Needless to say, we made proper weights after that.
Today, Backyard Patch Herbs has grown beyond the market stalls, but it’s still rooted in the same thing that started it all—sharing the joy (and occasional chaos) of growing and using herbs. And while I no longer spend five days a week at markets, I still double-check my labels for waterproofing... and I no longer trust salt as a structural element. Now you can find me at one Farmer Market, my local Farmer’s Market in Lombard, IL starting in late May.
