When it’s summertime in this localphile Valley, you can’t swing a harvested beet without hitting a farmers’ market. The latest trend: winter markets, which can be a boon to farmers’ off-season revenue streams—and to customers who each fall are newly traumatized by the transition from fresh-from-the-field salad greens to the flavorless, shrink-wrapped supermarket stuff.
And the latest community to get a winter farmers’ market: Springfield. On Saturday, Dec. 18, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Springfield Technical Community College will host the Springfield Winter Fare, organized by Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture. Fifteen local vendors will sell products including apples, pears, squash, meat, eggs, stone-milled flour, salad and cooking greens, and root vegetables, as well as items made from locally produced ingredients, like jams, maple products, baked goods—even soaps and lotions made from goat’s milk.
Local restaurants will be selling soup to hungry shoppers (CISA urges the environmentally conscious to bring their own mugs from home). The event will also include educational workshops and—an especially great idea—a “barter market,” where home canners can swap their excess jams, say, for someone else’s surplus jars of pickles.
And, in an effort to ensure that financially struggling families have access to all this fresh, local food, the Winter Fare will accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, credits (what used to be called food stamps), with CISA matching the first $5 of all SNAP purchases.
Springfield’s Winter Fare is not the only winter market in the Valley: CISA also plans a Northampton Winter Fare on Jan. 15, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School. In addition, a Greenfield Winter Fare is scheduled for Feb. 5, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at Greenfield High School, and a Bernardston Winter Market will take place on Feb. 19, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., at United Church, at 58 Church St.
Meanwhile, Springfield residents who can’t make this week’s fare at STCC, don’t despair: Belle-Rita Novak, organizer of the popular Forest Park summer farmers’ market, has organized a bimonthly winter market, also at Forest Park, the second and fourth Saturdays of the month (excepting Christmas) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
For more information on the Valley’s one-day and regularly scheduled winter farmers’ markets, as well as winter farm stands and farm-share programs, check out CISA’s website at www.buylocalfood.org.
