But she's a full-time, bona fide food enthusiast. Don't be intimidated by the white eggplant with pink or purple stripes that you'll find at Arnett's stall, or the exotic varieties of French and Italian green beans. This is a place where the customer is encouraged to experiment. Like a good teacher, Arnett is patient with customers whose education is still in the elementary stages. At their booths in Grants Pass and Medford she and husband Greg offer fearless buyers two-colored corn, yellow watermelons, yellow carrots and fingerling potatoes.
Direct marketing can be a two-way street between grower and customer.
An individual customer can influence what's put in the ground in the first place. One day at the Weed market grower Jim Eigenhaus was handed a packet of seeds by a lady who grew up in the South. Eigenhaus tried them out, and his early crops of black-eyed peas were, predictably, a hit with customers who'd grown up in that region. But he was pleasantly surprised to find that his Indochinese customers were scooping them up as well. Manuel Lawrence says he's tried over 60 varieties of vegetables in his early years as a grower, but he soon narrowed that down to his current specialty, carrots.