Janet Brassart
August 30, 1946 - June 11, 2024
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| Janet Brassart and her sister, Ruth Wise Vendors at the Emporia Farmers Market |
April 7, 2015
Janet and I sit behind her house looking over her backyard
garden, drinking Keystone Light and enjoying the sun. Always water-wise, she’s
disgusted that we’ve not gotten more rain. “Our first two years, it rained a
lot,” she tells me. “Market was great. And then we had a couple of dry years
and it was not so great. I was asking Ruth the other day, ‘If we’d had a year
like this that first year, would we still be doing this?’”
It is only a few weeks later, of course, that the clouds
roll in and the sky starts weeping. By June, we are asking if the rain is ever
going to stop.
Janet’s garden literally fills her back yard. There are four
beds, partially covered by some sort of light cotton sheeting to deter the
squirrels—Janet is no fan of squirrels. She points at two deep holes in the
center of a planter she has covered with chicken wire. “They got in!” she says,
adding a few expletives.
She pulls back the cover of a large pot at the edge of her
patio to reveal a cluster of beautiful, young bok choy (pak choi). “I may have
to come to the last winter market,” she says. “These will be ready. They won’t
wait for May.”
Janet uses her yard for vegetables, but she’s a fan of
flowers, too. The southern portion of her garden has tulips, daffodils, and an
assortment of greenery. She points out the asparagus nestled among the flowers.
It is ready to eat. Summer market season is just around the corner.
The back of the yard is host to raspberries, blueberries,
and currants. She’s got blackberries, too, though she’s not happy with the way
they are growing.
Vending at the Emporia Farmers Market was something Janet
decided to try out when she retired from teaching school, “just to see if I
could pay for my gardening habit,” she says.
“That first year I sold herbs and vinegar kits. People had
to supply their own vinegar. I had fresh herbs, the glass bottles, and I put
together these little salad mixes, nothing fancy. Nothing like the salads we
sell now. The first day I went to market, I took this pot of violets I picked
from the yard–they were weeds, really–to decorate the table. I sold it all. The
salads. The herbs. My extra jars that I had brought as samples. Everything was
gone, and this lady came up and admired that pot of violets. She said, ‘Oh,
that’s beautiful. Is that for sale?’ and I said, ‘Well, I guess it is.’”
I went home that night and called Ruth. I said, ‘You won’t
believe it.’ And then Ruth started coming to market with me.”
The sisters began selling at the Emporia Farmers Market in
2009. Janet became a member of the market’s board of directors in 2010. Ruth was
a frequent volunteer for special events and a farmhand to be counted on for the
market’s two biggest annual fundraisers; the Dirty Kanza Pre-Race Palooza
Dinner in the spring and the Soup-A-Palooza held each fall.
Ruth has a garden that is probably equal to Janet's in size, or larger. But because Janet’s fills the entire backyard of her house in
town and Ruth’s is dwarfed by the big metal shed that sits next to it at her home in
the country, one is left with the impression that Ruth has a little garden.
Ruth and her husband raise beef cattle and farm. Her home is surrounded by
flowerbeds and these flowers have become a staple of their market table in the
summer months. She might bring a dozen cut floral arrangements to each market
and it is a rare day when she does not sell each and every one of them.
In Janet’s backyard, we talk about the changes the market
has seen, the trends in food habits. “When I was growing up,” she says, “my dad
made a living on 300 acres. He may have rented a few more. If it was a bad year
for corn, he dug a pit and cut it for silage to feed the cows. We had chickens,
pigs, a garden, a milk cow. Everything was connected. You cut the tops off your
carrots and fed them to the chickens. Extra milk from the cow, we fed it to the
pigs. We cleaned out the chicken house each year and that all went to fertilize
the garden. That was the circle of life, not this Disney, Lion King crap.”
Before becoming vendors, neither Ruth nor Janet spent much
time at the market.
“I’ve always lived here—in or near Emporia,” says Janet.
“but I had never shopped the market before. I always grew my own food. I didn’t
need to go to the market.”
When I started managing the market, Janet and Ruth were
staple Saturday vendors throughout the summer season and attended the first
years of Indoor Winter Markets through December. They’d then take a break till
spring, whenever spring in Kansas decided to arrive.
Janet Brassart is a retired high school teacher with
three grown children and four grandchildren. She has lived in Lyon County since
1974 and in Emporia since 1983. She became an Emporia Farmers Market vendor in
2009 and a board member in 2010. Janet is a backyard gardener who grows
vegetables, small fruits and flowers. "There is hardly any grass left in
my back yard," she says. She believes in following an organic growing
strategy; work WITH nature, not against it.
Janet is a member of Lyon County Master Gardeners. As well as gardening, she
enjoys bird watching, reading, and fabric crafts.
TRMS, Emporia Farmers Market Manger, 2010-2016
Janet Brassart Obituary, Legacy.com
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| Janet and Evie Simmons serve soup at a Winter Market |
