Joe at the market garden called 100% Hay is always smiley, but this market day morning he’s looking especially chirpy. The sun is shining, customers are queuing, and the full bounty of summer is weighing heavy on his stall.
Laid out beside his year-round staples – potatoes, garlic, onions and chard – are boxes of summer fruit: red and yellow raspberries, deep purple blackcurrants, blush-red strawberries. Out of adjacent boxes spill the season’s first tomatoes and courgettes.
Joe’s riverside four-acre plot is just outside Hay-on-Wye and he’s a stalwart of the town’s Thursday market. I make a point of asking what is looking especially good. Today, it’s the Charlotte potatoes and Calabrese broccoli. Next week it could be cavolo nero leaves, say, or red Russian kale. He always tells it straight, and into my basket his suggestions go.
Long before it became famous for its secondhand bookshops and annual literary festival, Hay was renowned as a market town. Today, that home produce heritage is having something of a renaissance. More than 40 stalls now radiate out from the main square every Thursday morning, from the wood-fired pizza man to a genuinely French patisserie maker.
Amid all that choice I invariably find myself homing in on the newly renovated Cheese Market (a one-time manorial court room), where Joe has his stall. Because, in addition to his stellar produce he keeps stellar company. On one side stands Bernie with her Caerphilly pies and muffins, all fresh from the oven that morning. On the other is Tree with her selection of own-roast coffees and Tim with his homemade preserves.
If it all sounds very deli-tastic and pretentious, it’s not. A kilo of tenderstem, a hybrid of broccoli and Chinese kale, is one third cheaper than at the supermarket. Plus, Joe’s customers know that his produce was picked just the day before, not shipped in via chilled storage from goodness knows where.
I ask for some carrots and Joe picks a few out. They’re not his own, I should know. Last season’s crop is now long gone, he explains. And this season’s is still a way off. “So these?” I inquire. Bought from a certified organic wholesaler, he says. In the spirit of honest advertising, he points to a label on the box: “100% Elsewhere.”
Oliver Balch is author of Under the Tump: Sketches of Real Life in the Welsh Marches, £14.99. For a £11.99 copy, with UK p&p, visit https://bookshop.theguardian.com, or call 0330 333 6846.
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