Market On Your Calendar

Where to get fresh with the locals this spring

by Tami Fertig

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Published: May 6, 2008

Listen up, people. As we speak, hearty spears of asparagus and red, red rhubarb are descending upon our city, and it's only a matter of time before little strawberries and juicy watermelons follow their lead.

Mark Stehle Clark Park Farmers Market

Where is this produce? It'll soon be scattered across more than 30 farmers markets — run by Farm to City and the Food Trust — opening throughout Philly during spring and summer, featuring a bunch of new locations, farmers and cheesemongers. It's our job to track it all down. After all, we asked for it.

The numbers speak for themselves: In 1992, when the Food Trust began, it ran one farmers market. By 2003, it had 16; that number has nearly doubled in 2008.

"When we first started going weekly in the winter markets, Clark Park and Fitler Square, in 2005, I had to really scrounge for farmers. I was practically begging," says Nicky Uy, project manager of the Food Trust. Fitler had one farmer. Clark Park had three. Now, they both have roughly three times that many.

"People are more and more interested in getting to know their producers," says Uy. "Where is their food coming from? To me, half the fun is knowing how your food is grown, and who grew it."

The other half is finding the markets, which often open in the wee hours of the morning (OK, 10 a.m.). Our advice: Set your alarm clock, snip out this little list (which continues on p. 21) and check things off as you go.

Clark Park

43rd Street and Baltimore Avenue, Saturdays, year-round, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; Thursdays, opens June 5, 3-7 p.m.

The mother of all West Philly markets, Clark Park crams in up to 20 stands during summer and eight during winter. On Saturdays, there's Larry Russell, whose family has been making their Endless Mountains Cabin maple syrup since 1796. In the stand next to him is Amish baker Joel King with his chunky homemade ketchup (and whoopie pies for a buck). Urban Girls Produce's Gina Humphreys brings Southern crops — sweet potatoes, okra, tomatillos, poblano peppers and "anything that grows in the heat," she says — with the help of her daughter and a couple of other ladies, on her dad's Pennsville, N.J., farm. (After 20 years of being away, she returned to the farm eight years ago, though "I never really left," she says. "I had a garden wherever I went.") Liz Begosh, of Philly-based Betty's Tasty Buttons, makes fudge, graham crackers and "phluff" from local ingredients, based on her grandma's recipes (look for cornmeal macaroons and dog biscuits this summer). The list goes on and on: If you need pea shoots, go to Landis Dale Farm. Triple-berry jam? Margerum's Herbs.

That's only Saturday. In June, another market starts on Thursday, with exciting additions: Mountain View Poultry Farm's Barbara Shelly, known as "the chicken lady," has been making her turkey and chicken sausages (cordon bleu, tomato basil, apple-maple) for 28 years, and just started working on a sweet and tangy barbecue sauce for this summer. There's also Queens Farm, run by Ed and Xiuqin Yin, who grew up in China and now grow Asian veggies (daikon, edamame, oyster and shiitake mushrooms) in West Chester. And, new this year: Valley Shepherd Creamery, with a ton of raw sheep's milk cheese in tow.

Eat It: In addition to selling greens grown in their half-acre garden on Saturday, University City High kids make fruit smoothies ($1) using a stationary-bike-powered blender.

Mark Stehle Fitler Square Farmers Market

23rd and Pine streets, Saturdays, year-round, 9 a.m.-2 p.m.

For having only three stands, Fitler Square provides a ton of variety — especially in the dead of winter. Highland Orchards, which has been coming to the market from Wilmington, Del., for the past eight years, brings the bulk of the goods, including leafy greens, fresh herbs, fruit-filled pies, apple cider and fruits and veggies galore. They churn out as much different produce as possible by planting directly into the ground all year round, using four greenhouses. "One thing comes out, another thing goes in," says Highland farmer Ruth Linton. "Finish a row of radishes, put in a row of green beans." Right now, look for asparagus, fresh peas and strawberries, which she's "crossing our fingers on" for mid-May. They'll also have figs starting in June.

Farther down the sidewalk, during winter and early spring, Lancaster County-based Rineer Family Farms sells grass-fed beef and a small selection of neatly arranged vegetables. Look for them at Rittenhouse's Tuesday and Saturday markets come late spring and summer, when Amity Farms, aka Jeff and Ann Corbin, take their spot at Fitler with heirloom potatoes, garlic, herbs and the like, painstakingly grown in their Roxborough plot (they tried nine different kinds of oregano before deciding on the one they would sell).

Sandwiched in the middle is aforementioned Betty's Tasty Buttons, for all your melty fudge-sampling (and buying) needs.

Eat It: Highland Orchards' raw cow's butter tastes and smells like rich, flaky cheese, and transforms into a luscious sauce when melted. At $10.95 for a little tub, it's not cheap, but it'll last a couple of months in the freezer.

Wyck House, Germantown Avenue and Walnut Lane, Fridays, opens May 21, 2-6 p.m.

Started up last year, this little market scores points for bringing traffic to the historic Wyck House. Because nine generations of the same Quaker family lived here starting in 1690, the place is packed with fascinating tchotchkes, which you can see on a guided tour of the house and grounds. In the spot where the family once kept farm animals now sits a small vegetable garden, tended by farmer Landon Jeffries, who grows basic produce and heirloom tomatoes (Moonglow, black Krim). Supermarket tomatoes, he says, are marketable because of their consistent shape, taste and color. Heirlooms are less predictable. "A lot of them don't store well, so they're ideal for the market — literally transporting them a few hundred feet." Right now, he's experimenting with Asian eggplants, which are smaller and more delicate than their American counterparts.

Amos Fisher, the market's other attraction, is equally big into trying new veggies. The Amish farmer started coming to the Germantown area in 2001, selling at Cliveden Park and serving a predominantly black community. He'd bring standard stuff — tomatoes, melons, onions — but little by little, regulars started asking for other things, like collard greens. "When we first started, I didn't even know what those were," he says. "Now that's one of the largest we sell." When someone gave him seeds for banana squash, he had to look it up on the Internet to figure out how to grow it. "If a customer requests it, I'm trying it," he says. His most popular item, however, remains an old standby: "If we don't have sweet corn, they may as well not come."

Eat It: Amos Fisher's burdock root grows from seeds he got from Germany. It looks a bit like a twig and tastes like an artichoke.

Second and Lombard streets, Sundays, opened May 4, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; Saturdays, opens May 17, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

The Food Trust's pride and joy opened last July or, should we say, re-opened, since the Headhouse Shambles functioned as a marketplace from 1745 up until the 1950s. It's by far the largest and most varied open-air market in Philly, with about 30 vendors (many of which also go to Clark Park) and, unlike most of the others, offers not only food, but locally made soaps, wine and coffee. Our favorites, though, are all edible. Patches of Star Dairy's Elly Hushour sells nontraditional varieties of goat cheese, drinkable goat's milk yogurt and beginner-friendly cuts of goat meat, which is mild, she says, because it's very young and tastes somewhere between veal and lamb. Toward the fall, she'll add goat's milk fudge and liquid goat's milk soap.

Tom Culton, a one-man farming operation out in Lancaster County, grows a lot of strange vegetables and heirlooms — and by "a lot," we mean "100 varieties of tomatoes, 50 varieties of eggplant, 100-some varieties of peppers, up to 50 varieties of cantaloupe," he says. "There's more than that. I'm slacking." When he's not planting, Culton travels, trading seeds with people from around the world. He's hoping to have artichokes, which are difficult to grow in this area, in July.

Mark Stehle

A smaller but bustling market takes place in the Shambles on Saturday, as well, drawing, among others, Wimer's Organics (difficult-to-grow, certified-organic corn) and Amish farmer Henry Fisher, whose beets are known around Society Hill as "Henry's beets."

Eat It: If you're willing to wait in a crazy-long line, South Philly's Los Taquitos de Puebla makes piping-hot quesadillas (chicken, mushroom, squash flower, corn smut) right in front of you from scratch.

Tuesdays, opened May 6, 2-7 p.m., just south of South Street, between Fourth and Fifth streets

Bob Pierson, program director of Farm to City, helped create this one back in 1996, and some of its vendors have been selling here for nearly as long. Earl Livengood and his son, Dwain, have been bringing certified-organic produce (corn, strawberries, melons, seven different kinds of leaf lettuce) for some 10 years, recently adding grass-fed Angus beef to their repertoire.

Earl's buddy, Sam Consylman, often joins them on the trip to Philly, bringing wild fruits and veggies and generally anything odd. "They call me the forager," he says. "I get almost all of my stuff down along the Susquehanna River, right here in Lancaster County." That includes wineberries (similar to red raspberries), wild garlic ("much smaller," he says, "and not as strong"), pawpaw (the largest native North American fruit found in the area) and, most notably, morel mushrooms — if all goes according to plan. "They're the most finicky thing that grows in the wild," he says. "If things aren't exactly perfect, they won't grow. The temperature's gotta be just right. You have two weeks or maybe three and hardly ever four weeks out of the year." He also grows red sweet corn, Yacón (a native South American plant related to the sunflower) and burdock, which will be ready by fall.

Highland Dairy's John Marshall, another South and Passyunk vet, is our go-to guy for goat cheese tarts, goat cheese pierogis and goat cheesecake ("tastes more like a French custard," he says).

Eat It: Sam Consylman is one of the few farmers in the area to sell poke, a wild native North American plant that tastes similar to asparagus. "I'm trying to get other people to grow it," he says. "Every place I've introduced it, they want more, and I can't supply it."

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