The Rogue Magnolia

pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

i am taking a short break to wizard up some new and improved rogue magnolia endeavors. i will be re-launching my website here shortly, reformatting my blog (and updating the look), and re-launching my online shop. this is going to take quite a bit of preparation…and so, instead of giving you weird, awkward piecemeal blog posts because i’m too busy building my new webstuffs (ahem, like i have been for the last couple of months, oops)-i’m going to take a short hiatus.

but the next time i rear my little head, it will hopefully be with lots of great things to share with you.

and because a blog post is just weird (to me) without a picture, here’s a pic that the lovely lady behind inkwell calligraphy snapped of me taking pics at my earth day fashion show.

as i scanned the market, trying to decide which vendor to talk to for my first featured vendor post, i spied the smiling face of john wiley. many of our vendors have a big smile for you when you walk by, but i picked him mainly because he had friendly eyes.

i explained who i was and what i was doing, and he enthusiastically began talking with me about his deep love for the olde worthington farmer’s market. it’s the only market that john & marie wiley participate in. it has absolutely made their business. they used to live in town, and they decided to do this: become cattle farmers. their focus was well treated, grass fed cows. and the amazing support from marketgoers has made them a success.

i had one of their cards floating around my house from the winter market. i looked up their website and my jaw just dropped. i expected it to be all business: we have cows. we feed them grass. contact us here. blah. blah. blah. instead, i found this:

Farmers and market customers are mutually reconstructing an innocence, a sense of place, a spirit of season and cycle, which was supposed to have been superseded long ago. This is a mutual exercise, as tender and trusting as a band of actors working together on a play. And it is happening in real life. Children are growing up going to market on Saturday mornings. Suburbs are striving to establish viable markets in the same way they work to have good parks and schools, as part of making their community special.

i shouldn’t have been suprised, really. after all, when i talked to john (marie was busy ringing out customers), he was vivacious and well versed. he told me about their blog that morning. it’s a great blog. they openly give information out to customers, but what i love is that they openly give information out to others trying to do what they are doing: raising grassfed cattle. need to know how to build a fence that will keep 40 cows in (that’s the most they have at one time)? check the blog. want to know how john and marie feel about their farm and their cattle? i’ll tell you, it’s with deep awe and respect for the land, the animals, and the process. but don’t take my word for it, check the blog!

i’ll leave you with another excerpt that i found to be quite true, having lived for years on the outskirts of a small farming town:

Walk in wet clay and you have pounds of it clinging to your boots. Churn wet clay with tractor tires (or with the split hooves of animals weighing half a ton) and you have mud. Lots and lots of mud. Heavy and thick and more than a foot deep. On the six o’clock news, sometimes they show dramatic footage of mud slides, usually in Southern California. Seems like everything is exciting in California, or makes good TV—even their mud. In Central Ohio we don’t have mud slides. Our mud just lies there. It figures you will be along soon enough.

you can find john and marie every saturday, exclusively at the olde worthington’s farmers market. feel free to strike up a conversation about mud or fences or mob grazing…they’ll be happy to talk!