Farmers' markets

Saturday we visited the Lexington farmers' market, a lovely outside affair complete with Yuppies walking their tiny dogs and children. It is set up on a wide sidewalk on one of the downtown streets, and it's several blocks long. Like the West Side Market in Cleveland, it featured some sellers who obviously buy wholesale produce ... good quality produce, but it obviously wasn't from Kentucky. There were also plenty of local farms represented, too, included five or six places that specialized in flowers. One stall was nothing but huge oriental lilies ... you could smell it from half a block away. And a bunch of places had inexpensive bouquets made up out of garden flowers ... zinnias and glads and snapdragons, that sort of thing. They really reminded me of some of the arrangements my grandmother used to make when her garden was in full swing. Unfortunately, we had other errands to run after the farmers' market, and I didn't think the flowers would hold up well in the cooler we had for the veggies, so I left them behind. I didn't leave behind the Silver Queen corn one of the local farms was selling (heavenly!) or the heirloom tomatoes, or the golf-ball-sized blackberries from another stall, or the local freestone peaches. I've eaten more veggies and fruit in the past few days than I did in the two weeks before we went to the farmers' market, and I can't seem to wipe the tomato-and-corn-induced grin off my face.

Our town also has a farmers' market, which is held Tuesday and Saturday mornings at the parking lot at Lowe's. For the last two summers I have consistently forgotten to go there, resulting in me actually making it to the market maybe twice, and one of those times was when my neighbor pretty much dragged me out of bed to go buy tomatoes. Since I had such good luck at the one in Lexington, however, I have decided to make it a priority to go to the local one, and I reorganized my schedule so that I will be doing my grocery shopping on Tuesday mornings, just after I hit the farmers' market.

This morning we made our first pilgrimmage there, Liza and I, and boy, is it different from the one in Lexington. Lexington has mostly larger farms and orchards (like the place where I got the peaches for the reunion pies) and a smattering of ladies wearing cruelty-free shoes selling herbal soaps and honey. Some of the stalls were from farms from surrounding counties, places far enough away that I'm not entirely sure where they are in relation to us. Our local farmers' market, on the other hand, was staffed entirely by good old boys in pickup trucks who obviously just drove out of the holler to come sell corn and taters to the city folk. Teeth were optional, as were home-rolled cigarettes and big leather wallets attached to their pants with a long chain. All of them declared Liza the cutest child on the planet ("Look at that hair!"), and I doubt it was just because they wanted to make a sale.

The one thing I hate about farmers' markets is that most of the time, a lot of the stalls have the same produce. At the one here in town and the one in Lexington, all of the prices were similar for similar items, so you couldn't even make your purchasing decisions based on cost. So I have to decide - do I buy my corn from the guy with the fewest teeth, the most teeth, or the biggest pile of corn? Do I buy my heirloom tomatoes from the guy with the good selection, even though he keeps trying to sell me $8/lb homegrown woodear mushrooms to go along with them? Do I buy something from the people there with the weeks-old baby, just because I feel sorry for them? In the end, I picked out the shrewdest-looking old lady customers and followed them around, buying from the stalls they picked.

And, as always, I came home with waaaaay too much stuff. Today's haul included more Silver Queen corn (the kind my grandfather used to grow ... nothing else tastes right to me), four kinds of heirloom tomatoes, green peppers (4 for $1), tiny yellow crookneck squash (6 for $1), and a basketball-sized watermelon.

I had planned to write more, about how when picking heirloom tomatoes you want to find the most gnarly, deformed looking ones you can because they inevitably end up being the best tasting, and how our daughter keeps trying to eat corn on the cob without using her hands, but those blackberries aren't getting any younger, and I still have to figure out what to do with them. Peach/blackberry pie, anyone?