The Market:
Farmers Market
Donner Parking Lot
Compromise St. on the Harbor / map
Annapolis, Maryland
Sundays, 8:30 a.m. to noon
(May to November)
contact: annapolis@freshfarmmarkets.org
This market, right on the harbor in historic downtown Annapolis, is managed by FreshFarm Markets, an organization that sponsors 11 farmers markets in Washington, D.C., and adjacent parts of Virginia and Maryland. Unlike some other unregulated markets in the region, the ones run by this group are for producers only, which is to say, none of the vendors are supposed to be selling stuff they didn’t grow themselves. According to the organization’s rules, all farmers and producers “must be from the Chesapeake Bay watershed region (including the states of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia, within a 200-mile radius of Washington, DC.”
What I Bought:
Strawberries
These strawberries, from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, across the Chesapeake Bay from here, were from a farm that started harvesting berries four weeks earlier this year than usual, due to the exceptionally warm winter. With the arrival of strawberry season, my thoughts turn to one of my favorite unconventional uses of this fruit: strawberry mustard.
Price: $5
red leaf and (below) green leaf lettuce
These massive, densely packed heads of lettuce, larger than a basketball, were extraordinarily fresh and succulent and yielded a large salad a day for two weeks.
Price: $2
When I was a teenager, I read Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell’s grim novel about deeply impoverished sharecroppers in Georgia in the Great Depression. What I remember about the book is that the characters are utterly depraved and they subsist on little more than turnips. I wouldn’t touch a turnip for years after reading that book — until I discovered hakurei (aka Tokyo) turnips. I describe how to turn anyone into a turnip lover here.
Price: $2/bunch
red and white hakurei turnips
yellow beets
Price: $2/bunch