What Are You Growing?

I think the first farmers’ market I ever went to was in Los Angeles, about 60+ years ago when, in a post-WWII extravaganza, my parents—accompanied by 4 children—drove to southern California to visit relatives. One of the places we definitely went was the Farmers’ Market (at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly) in West Hollywood. I had never seen fruits of such size or of such abundance. Although I very much doubt we actually bought anything, it was plenty wonderful just to look at it all. In those days, you got lots of fruits and vegetables in the summer, but of a fairly narrowly-defined variety. The Farmers’ Market had things I’d never seen: artichokes, giant dates, limes, strange varieties of berries. It had more different kinds of cheese than I could have imagined existed in the world, let alone in a single market. It was amazing.

Fifteen years later, on a summer visit to Pennsylvania, I went to an Amish Farmers’ Market near York, PA, as I recall. They had eggs in a bowl—eggs that came without shells, twenty different kinds of lettuce, strange sausages, molasses pie (called ‘shoe fly pie’). Farmers’ markets in Massachusetts, many years later, were mostly about the many different varieties of local apples I’d never heard of and certainly never eaten: the macoun remains my best memory of an apple, although it might or might not be as good as the fruit on my own jonagold tree. Two weeks ago, in Sebastopol, CA, every crossroad seemed to have a little farmers’ market/fruit stand with all the wonders of central California edibles on display.

So, today, I wandered over to the Sunshine Coast’s Farmers’ Market in Sechelt to see what we had growing here. The weather has been so cool, I didn’t expect there to be much of anything at all, really, and I was not much surprised. There was one stand with four cartons of tomatoes (grown in a greenhouse somewhere locally, I imagine, as the nighttime temperatures are barely warm enough to permit fertilization of a tomato blossom, let alone growing and ripening of a fruit; another with garlic ‘scapes’ (the long green leaves of the underground garlic bulb which are sauteed and garlicy of taste) and ‘sea asparagus’ (this salty delicacy will be found wherever sea kayakers lurk. Carpeting the water’s edge on mud flats, sheltered coves and estuaries, sea asparagus … say no more, I think); yet another had some lettuce and other salad greens. No blueberries (yet), no strawberries (yet), no raspberries (yet)…not much of anything edible, really, and very little promise of too much more in the days to come.

But there were many, many booths, because, for the most part, the Farmers’ Market is a craft sale. There were lots of stands with jewelry, with hand-knit scarves and hats and kids’ sweaters, with garden rocks, with pottery, with more jewelry, with wind toys, and with driftwood decorations. Tables with carved soapstone, with potted plants, with yet more jewelry, soap, locally ground soft wheat flour (!), paintings, drawings, and finally tables with a palmist and a quick-sketch character artist and a busker playing the accordion.

This is what happens when you try to do a Farmers’ Market in an area where there are no farms and where, instead, artists and craftspersons are very thick on the ground. But perhaps we could just think of ourselves up here on the Sunshine Coast as people who farm art and craft, and it appears that we have raised a bumper crop of both.