The Country Fair

This entry has been inspired by my friend Rupert's article in the Natal Witness where he described the market day in Alexandra Park,Pietermaritzburg.

Fresh produce is the heart of the market.There are piles of shiny spinach and crisp cabbages, young mealies, pumpkins yellow, white, blue, round or flat but not square; green, yellow, and red peppers; blushing tomatoes, sweet sprouts, crunchy cucumbers, gem squash, onions of varied sizes and colours, potatoes medium and small, carrots straight and crooked, avocados, beans, brinjals, broccoli, butternuts, etcelery. There’s an organic vegetable stall.

Well compared with the excitement of the farmers market our fair was a bit of a drab affair as the day dawned dull and overcast. Why is it that the weather turns nasty on such occasions. It is always held on Waitangi Day which is a sort of a National Day commemorating the signing of the Waitangi agreement between Maori and Queen Victoria.

Fruit of all kinds in season makes the mouth water — a veritable cornucopia of grapes, litchies, peaches, plums, nectarines, bananas, papaws, mangoes, melons and more. Soon there will be prickly pears and in autumn persimmons and naartjies. Dennis and his clan dole out portions from huge tubs of picture-book fruit salad, colourful chopped casserole vegetables, and dark red sliced beetroot.

Our fair really didn't have any fruit but if it had you would also have been able to have any fruit you liked as long as it was an apple.We had our plant stall of course but now every year more and more are having plant stalls which makes it more difficult for us.The copy cats.
There were clothing stalls, and book stalls and I wondered what they did if it actually started raining with all the books laid out on tables.It made me wonder just how many people in the world were able to write books and sell them and just how did people have so much time to read all those thousands and thousands of books on every subject under the sun.Books on gardening,dressmaking, woodwork, war, veteran cars or how to farm alpacas,you name it and there will be one.

Flowers — roses, proteas, chrysanthemums, and lilies, just for starters — by the truckload beg to be taken home. Buy plants to grow your own flowers — annuals, perennials, shrubs, climbers, ferns, baby trees. If the obliging plant sellers don’t have what you want, they will get it for you. Usually there will be a few non-commercial flowers and plants from home gardens — elegant arums, frothy hydrangeas, red Natal bottlebrush, yellow ginger with long red stamens like painted fingernails, sometimes Crinum and Scadoxus rooted in bags — and aromatic sprays of penny-gum leaves.

Right next to us we had some lasses and lads performing Scottish dances so beautifully. Some were so tiny and cute,but I'm sure they made up for the lack of sun.Further away country and western music was being performed. Strolling down one of the side streets lined with stalls of every kind,but no fruit or apples, there was a lass playing the violin.

Shoppers and stallholders, no less than the produce and home cooking on offer, make our market a special place. Little knots of friends stand chatting while others — solitary strollers, hand-holding couples, family parties — saunter or hurry by, enjoying the day or intent on their purchases. Ramblers with faraway eyes bump into fellow hikers, happy to relive the last walk and eagerly anticipate the next; recent excitement was finding a few Christmas bells, once common but now sadly rare, plundered to the edge of extinction.

People arrived from Hastings and Napier to swell the buyers but being a cool day were not dressed in bright summer clothing.

It finished all too quickly with many of our plants unsold but I think we did as well as expected and were not too disappointed. The hard part was loading everything back on the the ute and having to put it back into the nursery.