Secrets of the farmers market
What I didn't know before I worked a stand at the Clark Fork market
by Kate Whittle
Missoula farmers market season kicked off last week, marking the annual return of the most idyllic days in town. For years, I was completely suckered by the Farmers Market Mystique. I loved biking downtown on a cool morning to browse beautiful, gleaming produce, all cheap and tasty, sold by friendly-looking people.
One of the market tables from my season at Harlequin Farms. That is some professional beet bunching right there. More on that later.
I was so suckered by farmers markets that when I ditched my office job and looked for something totally different, I took a six-month internship on an organic farm in Arlee. Turns out that the time I spent looking tan and radiant over a heaping display of beautiful produce was very small. I might write more about that later, but for now, here are some things I personally didn’t know or really think about before I worked at a farmers market stand for a season. Some of them will probably shock you with how silly I was.
This is the pollen-y gunk that gets on your hand when you pick hundreds of cherry tomatoes.
Go before 10 AM or very late to avoid crowds. In the last 15 minutes before close, (1 PM for our market) you can sometimes score deals on veggies that farmers don’t want to pack up to bring back to the warehouse. But just because there’s a lot left at market, that doesn’t mean it’s going to waste. The leftovers get eaten, donated, sold to restaurants or composted, depending on what type of produce it is.
Buy what’s there and learn to cook with it. The farmers market isn’t a place to take a recipe, it’s a place to learn how to expand your repertoire.
It takes a massive amount of effort to grow beautiful produce. If you see big tables with lots of variety, that usually means they’re planting several acres and employing several farmhands/children. Many of the bigger operations also sell wholesale to grocery stores, but the profit margins are higher at market.
The produce is (mostly) fine at the end of a hot day. I used to worry about whether the veggies would be good after sitting out on a table all day in the summertime. But for most of the season, it’s pretty cool and shady all morning. Even in mid-July heat, kale that was picked yesterday will still be more flavorful than grocery store kale that could be weeks old. Just dunk it in some ice water when you get home and refrigerate it promptly.
Please don’t ask the poor bastard running the market stand if they grew this stuff. Many of these farmers put in 50-, 60-hour weeks and get up before dawn on market day, and then people ask, wide-eyed, “Did you guys grow this stuff?” I do not care if you read some expose on third-party vendors at farmers markets somewhere. Look, someone, somewhere, worked their butt off to grow every single piece of food you’ve ever eaten.
Giant zucchinis are lousy. Zucchini and their cucurbit relatives the cucumbers are both best when they’re on the smaller side. The bigger they get, the more tasteless, watery and seedy they become.
Dixon isn’t a type of melon. It’s a town.
It’s fine if you forgot your reusable grocery bag. The bigger market stalls probably have some grocery bags.
You don’t need to apologize profusely about forgetting your reusable bag. People drive trucks and SUVs down to market, circle downtown to find the closest parking space, and then act like their reusable bag will really break the environmental bank.
I think all the time about the earth-warrior lady who bought onions and potatoes, which we packaged in red plastic mesh sacks. She carefully untied the knots, dumped the loose onions and potatoes out into her canvas tote, and handed us the two empty plastic mesh bags with a virtuous air. Those mesh bags cost, like, a nickel, and are easy to reuse at home. Please save your time and energy for something else.
Have your money ready. People get in this weird daydreamy state at farmers markets and lose track of everything they’re carrying. So many times I waited on customers who got to the front of a line before digging in their pockets for crumpled $5 bills, or realized their wife was holding the cash. Meanwhile everyone in line behind them is giving murder eyes.
Somebody spent a lot of time trying to make this look pretty so you’ll buy it. Prior to working on a farm I had never even so much as gardened, and I really had no concept what it takes to process raw produce. What you see at market is picked, carefully selected for size and quality and washed.
Just look at how effing beautiful these bunches are paired and stacked. They do not come out of the ground that way, people. I worked with women in the field who could look at a row of beets in the ground, pull out three of an identical size, tie them into a 1-pound bundle and stack them in a case, all within 30 seconds and five swift movements. I am still in awe of them.
Lastly, it’s pretty fun to ask the farmers for recipe ideas. When I worked on a farm we spent many of our working hours bullshitting about our plans to cook or pickle the beautiful fresh veggies we were processing. When the market was slow, I loved to talk people’s ears off about ways to use salad turnips (a really lovely tender-sweet white radish) or the joys of beet-green pesto. If you’d like some ideas on what to do with the produce, farmers will have some good ideas.
