Sold Out

This morning we set up a booth at the local sansai (mountain vegetable) festival. To our surprise, we sold out within two hours, and are kicking ourselves for not picking more. The problem with most unprocessed sansai however, is that it is really only good to sell the same day or, in some cases, two days after picking. If we had taken too many bamboo shoots and were not able to sell them, we would have no idea what to do with so many leftovers.

I think we were the first to sell all ours because of our innovative marketing strategy -basically, do something unique. Most of the people had the same goods, and many of them were higher quality because pros just "know" which warabi or bamboo shoots will sell, and so don't pick as many "lower-quality" as we did. In order to differentiate, we offered a little game whereby customers can take one shot at grabbing as many of our "too-thin" bamboo shoots as they could fit in one hand for about half the price of our 500g bundle. This drew enough people to our booth that we soon had to start refilling the "dud" pile with our "good" shoots - which were also selling extremely well at the higher price.

I also got up early this morning and rode into the mountain in the rain to pick the purple flowers you see in the photo. These are from the Fuji tree, and are said to be quite delicious as tempura. We had never had them ourselves, but told everyone how great they tasted while adding a bit of exoticness and color to our table. It worked, and we even sold all ten of the flowers we brought.

While we didn't really make a whole lot of money this time, based on what we know now, we could easily make enough to live on just doing this each weekend. Hmmm....

Other things you see at our table, left to right: gyojaninniku (field garlic), Yama Fuki (stems only), warabi (a type of edible fern), take no ko (ne-magari-take) (bamboo shoots), yama udo (Japanese Spikenard), Zenmai (another type of fern - you can seephotos of how they are processed on a previous post), and finally, the tempura tray - fuji flowers, yukinoshita (strawberry begonia), and kogomi leaves.

Big thanks to our neighbor who showed us where to pick, let us get some from her land, and also spent a long time teaching us how to prepare them for sale.