A favorite warm-weather pastime for Springfieldians begins in April as the city’s three farmers markets get into full swing, with vendors popping up like crocuses to sell everything from hen eggs and jam to baked goods and fresh flowers.
While two markets operate year-round on Saturdays, this month the Greater Springfield Farmers Market adds Tuesdays and Thursdays to its schedule, Farmers Market of the Ozarks opens an hour earlier until October, and the C-Street City Market opens for the season on Thursdays and Saturdays.
Savvy shoppers have learned to get to markets as soon as they can in hopes of snagging in-demand items before they’re sold out.
“We have so many great vendors,” said Jesse Stone, the manager at Farmers Market of the Ozarks. The market, which operates in Farmers Park at 2144 E. Republic Road, draws 60 to 80 vendors each year.
Still, there’s a good chance that few shoppers have been awake as long as many of those hard-working vendors.
Hungarian pastries prep begins at 1 a.m.
Ildiko Pearson is one of these early risers. On a recent Saturday, her table at Farmers Pavilion was half-empty by noon.
On market days, only a few hours after night owls go to bed and several hours before early birds begin to chirp, Pearson wakes up and goes to her kitchen.
Soon, the comforting aromas of babka, challah, chimney bread and her Grandma Erzsebet’s apricot cookies fill the night air, reminding Pearson of her childhood in Hungary. Now living in Springfield, Pearson began selling her European pastries six years ago.
Even though getting out of bed at 1 a.m. to start baking long before her customers have had their first cup of coffee can make for a long day, it’s important that her baked goods are fresh, she says.
“Everything is like how we bake at home,” Pearson says.
At the Greater Springfield Farmers Market a little more than two miles north, other vendors rise early, too, to drive loaded trucks and trailers to the Battlefield Mall parking lot at Battlefield Road and Glenstone Avenue.
By mid-April, Mary and Ruth Brubacker will spend about two hours on the highway traveling to and from the market three days a week to sell produce grown on 12 acres at their family’s farm in Wentworth.
Last Saturday, the sisters sold baskets of herbs along with handmade soap. Before long, Mary says, shoppers will see broccoli and even early greenhouse-grown tomatoes at their table; come summer, they’ll find sweet corn, watermelons and zucchini, to name just a few vegetables.
What goes into market days?
Getting ready for market days is more challenging than it may look, vendors agree.
A few tables away from the Brubackers, succulents, pansies and primroses were among the annuals and perennials Rooted Deep Farms owner Heather Kite sold.
It isn’t a long trip to the market from her greenhouse in Bois D’Arc, she says, yet preparing an estimated 2,500 plants for that trip isn’t easy. In fact, Kite says, “It can be exhausting, actually.”
First, she and her sons spend hours grooming plants, plucking discolored leaves and shriveled blooms. Then, she says, “It’s an all-day event on Friday to load the trailer.”
After that, Kite makes signs in the evening, then turns in to get up early on Saturday to drive to Springfield because it takes “at least an hour and a half to pull everything off the trailer and throw it on the table.”
Kite says all of this with a bright smile: Two years ago, she began selling plants there after working for three growing seasons at Hilltop Farm in Ash Grove, where she says she learned how to garden.
Like other vendors at Springfield’s markets, Kite is living her dream.
At the Providence Farm table back at Farmers Market of the Ozarks, hen eggs in a delicate shade of aqua nest in a carton between a blackboard advertising free-range duck meat and bags of grits ground from heirloom corn.
Wes and Ame Hunter started the farm near Marshfield about seven years ago, even though he’s from Springfield and she’s from St. Louis.
“Neither of us grew up on a farm, but we decided to make a go,” Wes Hunter says. “Our sort of overall goal is subsistence farming — growing our own food — and we expand from there.”
Expanding into brick-and-mortar
For some farmers market vendors, sales at tables have even financed brick-and-mortar shops. Marrella Vineyard, C-Street City Market manager, says she knows of at least 10 local merchants who got their start at the center-city farmers market, about two miles north of Park Central Square.
In 2007, Commercial Street’s Basilico Italian Café owner Marty Cooper was one of those vendors. She and co-owner Gina Cooper sold food at the C-Street market for more than three years before opening their first shop, Sisters in Thyme, then the café.
“I had built up my clientele so that I could go into a brick and mortar because I was cooking in my home and there just wasn't the room for the volume that I needed to do,” Marty says.
The 22-year-old market expects to have 60 or more vendors this year, including five bakers and two jewelry-makers as well as produce growers, according to Vineyard: “Here we ask that you make it (on) your own, you grow it yourself,” she says.
Whatever its story, each Springfield farmers market has its points of pride.
For example, Stone says Farmers Market of the Ozarks offers locally grown produce and antibiotic-free meats — like the Hunters’ duck meat.
Moreover, while Jewish customers may stop by Pearson’s table for babka and challah breads, vendors like Morning Sun Farms offer meat for Muslim customers that has been butchered in accordance with Islamic law. Outside of larger Missouri cities, Stone says, “It is the only place you can get halal meat.”
And at the Greater Springfield Farmers Market, founded in 1979, manager Tracy Parson says, simply, “We’re the original farmers market.”
For her part, at that market Kite is just happy to be doing what she’s doing. She recalls driving past greenhouses several years ago and thinking about how much she would love to have one.
“I don’t know how I got here, but I did,” she says.
Want to go?
C-Street City Market, 321 E. Commercial St.: Hours are 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays and 4 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays.
Farmers Market of the Ozarks, 2144 E. Republic Road: Starting Saturday, hours are 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. for this year-round Saturday market.
Greater Springfield Farmers Market, Battlefield Road and Glenstone Ave.: Starting April 14, the year-round Saturday market will also be open on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 a.m. to noon until October.
