Remembering Janet Brassart

Janet Brassart

August 30, 1946 - June 11, 2024 

I saw the news a couple of nights ago that my dear friend, Janet Brassart, had passed away. We haven’t kept in touch as well as I would have liked in recent years, but I feel her loss. She was a friend and mentor when I was new to Emporia. She was a citizen role model. Here’s a piece I wrote after spending an afternoon with Janet in 2015.

 

Janet Brassart and her sister, Ruth Wise
Vendors at the Emporia Farmers Market

Emporia Farmers Market – Vendor Profile

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

Janet and Evie Simmons serve soup
at a Winter Market