To continue my “Farmers Market Trolling” posts I want to tell you about our experience at the Local ONLY Farm Market we checked out.

The next morning we woke early and headed over to Penny Lane Coffeehouse to scope out the” local only market” and to get some coffee goodness. Penny Lane graciously opened their sidewalk space for fine art’s vendors and local farmers to sell their goods.

There was an antique shop next to the coffee shop that was displaying lots of fun things, it added to the atmosphere of the sidewalk sale.

I was sad to see that there was only one produce booth. For some reason I thought there were several more farmers presenting at this event, so that was a disappointment for me.

Word has it the farmers sell out of produce quite early so I don’t know if some sold out and went home or what. Penny Lane says:

We do have plenty of produce because we have 2 large farmers and one grower. We have had two weekends of them completely selling out all of their produce. We have had a huge response. I have almost 2,000 facebook fans and 1,000 on my email list from 7 years of business. The majority of my patrons are foodies and/or vegan/vegetarian.

The Local-Only Market has two, possibly three more farmers joining them tomorrow morning 7/16. They will have okra, eggplant, squash, sweet corn, potatoes, melons, peaches, nectarines, cantaloupes, tomatoes, baked goods, zucchini, green beans, blackberries. There will also be a couple of new artists…

Regardless of the limited produce when we arrived, we still really enjoyed poking around the booths and we of course supported the farmer that was there, Esther’s Gardens.

Esther’s Gardens had things like zucchini, tomato, beans and peppers for sale. We didn’t need any zucchini or tomato but we did chat about how to prepare it in creative ways. The peppers we had to have because we got kabobs in our meat share again and it turns out I like bell peppers, pineapple and beef kabobs very much! Mmm.

Specifically we choose Bell Peppers & Sweet Banana Pepper to buy. Bell Peppers are common but the Sweet Banana Peppers were a very pleasant surprise! They are so mild and flavorful, we even cut one up and tossed it in our scrambled eggs. Everly even ate some.

So both markets were a welcome adventure for us. Now we are just looking to buy what we don’t already have growing or we need to get growing more stuff.

Now, if more local vegetable gardeners and farmers would just get on Veggie Swap already we could trade harvests and forgo exchanging money all together!