First Harvest - ready for the Farmers Market

**David LaFerney** · 07-21-2011, 05:18 PM

104 Quarts total - from one mail order package in '09, and much work. Wish me luck.

**Me Beeing Me** · 07-21-2011, 05:44 PM

That's awesome, David!

Good luck and keep us posted

**Bigtwin** · 07-21-2011, 07:31 PM

Congrats and hope to have a similar harvest in a couple seasons

**Mbeck** · 07-21-2011, 08:06 PM

Very nice!
Good luck!

**natureboy68** · 07-21-2011, 08:52 PM

Excellent! How about a look at your label?

**earthchild** · 07-22-2011, 08:50 PM

Nice job!!!

**David LaFerney** · 07-24-2011, 03:00 PM

Sold almost $500 worth @ $14/qt and $8/pt - pints outselling quarts by about 50% (in unit sales) I bet 16 ounce squeeze bottles would sell good at $5 per. Live and learn.

My labels are just some avery address labels that I already had with this:

Pure Local Honey
Produced at Whitehall apiary
David LaFerney
454 Whitehall rd.
Cookeville, TN

About 7 miles north of town
Harvested July 2011
XXX-XXX-1635

**natureboy68** · 07-24-2011, 10:31 PM

Great job! Did the pints have a pound of honey, or you just filled them up and whatever they were...

**Pugs** · 07-24-2011, 11:06 PM

Originally Posted by natureboy68

... Did the pints have a pound of honey, or you just filled them up and whatever they were...

Nature Boy,

A pint of honey should weigh more than a pound. About 12 liquid oz of honey weighs about 16 oz. It looks like he pretty much filled the jars, so they should have weighed around 1 lb 4 oz, or 1 1/3 pounds of honey, if I did the math right. Too tired to think.

Honey is sold by weight. And I say around since it matters how dry the honey is.

This gets confusing every year! What we get for using the same unit of measure for weight and liquid.

Pugs

**David LaFerney** · 07-25-2011, 06:36 AM

That's correct - I just filled the jars, and didn't label them as to how much they contained. My sign did price it as pints and quarts.

The Friday market was a "Buy Local" event promoted by the department of agriculture, and the local extension agent stopped by for a few minutes and they actually used some of my honey as part of a display up front - I didn't win a prize or anything.

Anyway, it's informal, but seemed to pass muster. Tennessee is fairly relaxed about such things - especially for small time local producers. We aren't even required to collect or pay sales tax.

BTW, when I was speculating on the saleability of smaller containers I meant to say that 8 oz (1/2 pint) squeeze bottles might sell for $5. Less out of pocket clearly drives the sale of smaller containers.