Gardner Farmer's Market

This is our year of discovering the local farmer's market's around us and trying to eat in-season produce as much as possible.

This week we tried the Gardner Farmer's Market. It's is open June, July and the 1st week of August on Friday's 3:30pm until sell-out. We were hoping to find peaches, berries and plums and other in-season goodies! So, I loaded up the kids, my son's wagon, and off we went.

I checked the website http://www.gardnerfarmersmarket.com/ first for directions or an address but it only indicated the corner of Main and Sycamore St.. Can't be that difficult to find in a small town right? It was actually pretty easy.

Like all small town farm market's it's not big and had maybe a dozen vendors. The vendors are what brings the charm to these markets. They know their product well, and usually offer samples and recipies too.

I bought the kids popcorn to eat while we strolled around and enjoyed the live jazz playing. The first thing I like to do is look at everything then decide what to buy. I even try to buy a little from each vendor as the prices are all similar.

We saw lots of corn, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, honey, potatoes, homemade bread & baked goods, jam and preserves, jalapeno candy!, bbq and more. We sampled some of the jalapeno candy and it was actually good! Hot, but good!

I bought a huge zucchini (gonna try to make bread with it), onions, cherry tomatoes (which our son eats like grapes), blackberries (shh, I'm hiding these from the kids so I can make fruit roll-ups), honey, honey bug-lotion (to send to Iraq), green beans, 1 jar strawberry jam & 1 orange marmalade, and bbq to take home for supper.

On our way home we stopped at our favourite local BBQ place, Hillsdale Bank BBQ, and picked-up a bottle of their famous sauce "The Sauce" for $3.20 http://www.thesauce.com/.

We also stopped at our local cofffee-shop http://www.countrybeanpaola.com/ for a bag of The Roasterie coffee. The owner was kind enough to grind the beans for us at no extra charge. We're now trying to buy local when it comes to our coffee and this seems to be a good local choice http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-roasterie-cafe-kansas-city

Slowly we're reaching our goal of eating in-season, and supporting our local community. It takes some effort, but what I'm finding is it's usually very affordable and easy once you begin to figure it all out. I hope this post inspires some of you to do the same and offered some useful tips.

Share your stories with us!