The Farmers Market That Changed Everything

We are almost twelve years old.

And I still catch myself saying we are just getting started.

Nowhere do I feel that more than at a little farmers market on Padre Island. The one I helped build. The one that, in so many ways, built us.

It started with a feeling

We lived in Hawaii for a while, and every Thursday night the whole town gathered at the farmers market. It was the heartbeat of the place. When we moved to Padre Island with three little boys, I kept feeling like something like that was missing. A gathering place. A reason for everyone to show up on a weeknight.

So my neighbor and friend Kelly DeNovellis and I just started one.

It was 2016. We had no blueprint, no experience, and no extra money. We just knew the Island needed it. Less than two months after we said the words out loud, the first Padre Island Farmers Market opened.

The tent taught me everything

The market grew, and our little Tula tent grew with it.

I never had a real plan for who would work it. I just asked my friends. Come help me sell some Tula. And they did. I would tell them to pick any piece they wanted off the table as a thank you. That was the deal. A day at the tent for a piece or 2 that you loved.

One of those friends was Sara.

We were young moms then, practically babies ourselves. She came to help at the tent one day, and she never left. Almost ten years later, she is still with Tula Blue full-time, now from Houston. She is behind so much of what you see and read from us, the photos, the emails, the look of the whole thing. We are even taking a business course together right now, still learning, still figuring it out. Two women who met at a market, still at it all these years later.

That is the part that gets me.

 

The night I will never forget

There was a stretch when that market got so busy we had six or seven people working the Tula tent at once. One line for custom pieces. One line just to check out. People everywhere.

I will never forget it. It was incredible.

It was never quite the same after COVID, and that is okay. We kept it alive anyway, once a month, the Tula girls organizing vendors and setting out signs, doing whatever it took.

Ten years in, it grew up

This year, the market reached a milestone of ten years and entered a whole new chapter.

It has a beautiful new home at Whitecap Living.

For the first time, it has a real board, led by vendors who love it, and I get to sit in an advisory seat and cheer them on. There are new hours this month, too, five to eight in the evening, which in this Texas heat is the only way to do it.

These days, our focus has shifted. We are online more than we are under a tent. We do things a little differently now. But that market will always, always be part of Tula Blue.

Still setting up the tent

Because that market is where I learned how we do things.

Friends are showing up. Making something by hand with the people around you. No master plan, just the next right thing, and then the next one.

Twelve years later, I am still setting up a tent. It just looks a little different now.

And I promise you, we are only getting started.