Market gains

Farmers' markets are underway, though it's early in the season. You can find exquisite salad ingredients -- delicate sylvetta arugula, upland cress, and spicy wrinkled watercress, all looking pristine and sold in separate bins by Siena Farm at Boston's Copley Square market. Spring-dug parsnips are at Dick's Market Garden of Lunenberg, along with hothouse tomatoes and lettuces started indoors. Kimball Fruit Farm promises black cherry tomatoes, pink eggplant, and sweet cherries later in the season at Cambridge's Central Square and other markets. Unusual dried herbs like stevia, a sweetener reputed to help regulate blood sugar, are at the Sangha Farm stand at the Cambridge location.

Some markets are already operating at full tilt; others have only a few farmers and more joining later. Most will be open by next week, offering fresh produce, artisan-made foods, and other products. Growers who sell at farmers' markets have long days, often beginning with picking in the fields before making the drive into Boston. But hours bagging radishes or explaining how to use summer savory can be a big source of farm income -- sometimes changing the way farmers do business.

Markets are steadily increasing in number in Massachusetts, says Jeff Cole, executive director of the Federation of Massachusetts Farmers' Markets. According to David Webber of the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, there are 125 markets, ranging from big ones such as Newton's Cold Spring Park (25 vendors) to a small one in Lynn (three growers). Two new ones in the Greater Boston area are the Belmont market, which opened last Thursday, and the second effort by the Boston Public Market initiative at Dewey Square near South Station, which started on Wednesdays a week ago.

In the California model, says Cole, many small farmers make ``very big chunks of their incomes" from markets because farm stands are limited by state laws. But in Massachusetts, income from direct marketing is spread over markets, farm stands, sales to restaurants, and community supported agriculture (CSA) shares, where consumers pay a certain sum for a specified amount of vegetables at the beginning of the season. Direct marketing of farm products is growing across the country, says Charlie Touchette, the executive director of the North American Farmers Direct Marketing Association, headquartered in Western Massachusetts. His organization is about to release a study done with Michigan State University. ``Farmers' markets are booming; farm stands are booming," he says. ``We're learning overall that customers more and more seem to seek out products from their neighborhood." And farmers are discovering that as supermarkets and big box stores are buying much of their produce overseas, direct sales are the key to surviving, says Webber. Massachusetts is No. 1 in New England in direct marketing, he says, and seventh in the nation.

TO MARKET, TO MARKET Farmers' markets are community gathering places, where you run into old friends while buying lettuces, fresh vegetables, farmstead cheeses, and a bouquet of flowers. Are there growers you return to week after week and year after year? Tell us how you shop at www.boston.com/ae/food.

Marie Hills, who with her husband, Carl, owns Kimball Fruit Farm in Pepperell, is well aware of that. A friendly face at many markets, Hills shows off crisp, jagged-leafed mizuna and some radishes recently near the end of her day at the Central Square market. ``We used to sell 80 percent wholesale and 20 percent retail," she says. ``Now it's flipped."

Some growers sell directly to chefs, which sounds like an ideal system, but Steve Parker, who has several restaurant clients, including East Coast Grill & Raw Bar in Cambridge and EVOO in Somerville, says it's not easy for either farmer or chef. Parker, presiding over the last bunches of collards and heads of lettuce at the Central Square market, had quickly sold out of everything he had -- spinach, greens, cilantro, kale, beets, fennel. All were started indoors. He's been farming for 17 years, and though he has long-established links with chefs, the farm-to-chef system becomes tricky when chefs need vegetables Parker doesn't have or they can't use his surplus. ``It complicates their lives," he says. Parker finds farmers' markets work better for him. ``It's a bit more profitable at markets," he says.

But market life isn't easy for the growers. It's ``a physically taxing and challenging way to sell your product," says Cole. It includes hauling bushels of vegetables and fruits, packing the truck, negotiating traffic, and then long days of selling. ``It can mean a better bottom line than wholesale, but not always."

For Hills and others, the connections are important, too. During the season, she and her family figure on 10-hour days seven days a week, selling at 10 markets all over the metropolitan area. She thinks the interlocking markets work well, so that people who hear about her farm but can't get to Arlington on Wednesday, for instance, can drop by Belmont on Thursday or Somerville's Union Square on Saturday. She makes sure she takes care of her regulars. In the height of the season, she might run out of something (blueberries are one item in demand) that a customer wants at the Saturday Cambridgeport market. If she knows that the Kimball stand at Union Square might have the berries, she calls her employees there and tells them to hold them for her customer. In a sense, the farmer acts as a small-town grocer might have in another era.

As with any business, regulars are important to farmers. David Gilson, who owns Gilson's Herb Lyceum in Groton, has gotten to know the patrons he's cultivated over the years at the Copley Square market. ``Each market has its own personality," he says. Participating in several extends his season into the summer and fall after spring plant sales at his nursery are over. And getting to know people while selling to them is a valuable form of agri-education: He explains to two women that the little ornamental cypress trees at his stand will do well indoors in a Back Bay condo.

A new market is not always embraced by local businesses. Heli Tomford , one of the organizers of the new Belmont market, says the effort began two years ago, evolving after rumors that the town's one working farm, Sergi's on Richardson Road, might be closing. Although there has been some resistance to the market in the business community and Sergi's is still operating, the market committee worked hard on education. To introduce the market, the committee offers a newsletter, Roots and Sprouts, which defines terms such as ``integrated pest management" and ``sustainable agriculture" and includes recipes. ``We've tried very, very hard to make this a positive thing for everybody we can think of," Tomford says. She points out that customers who come weekly to Belmont Center to buy goods might be more aware of retail businesses in that part of town and return to shop on other days.

Don Morgan, the market manager of the Marblehead Farmers' Market, now in its ninth year, believes the markets can be a uniting force for a community. Marblehead started with three vendors and is now up to 12; it attracts as many as 1,200 people on sunny Saturdays in the height of the summer. Middle Earth Farm of Amesbury and Clark's Farm of Danvers bring an array of produce; River Rock Farm of Brimfield offers naturally raised beef; Clear Flour Bakery from Brookline sells baguettes and pastries. There is also an area where a chef of the day gives out samples from a local restaurant or caterer and musicians perform. You can buy coffee and see neighbors greeting one another -- even on rainy days. Market day becomes a ``community event," says Morgan, a retired engineer.

His view seems to be a metaphor for a successful market, which connects urban dwellers to rural life, teaches consumers to value what the earth provides or how a tomato or a peach should taste, and offers a gathering place for townspeople. As Hills of Kimball Fruit Farm says: ``Customers who come to farmers' markets are nicer."