Neighborly Charm: Straight From the Farm

Tuesday morning around 9:45, I took the blue knapsack from its hook in the closet, stuck 10 bucks in the front pocket and put my small dog on her leash. She pulled me two blocks west, past Launderland and a crowd of day workers, to Villa Parke, where about 40 farmers and sellers, parked in a large circle in the soccer field, were hawking eggs, nuts, fruit, vegetables, honey and fish.

On this bright June day, I found my first vine-ripened California-grown tomatoes of the year and some sweet, very dense peaches, plus my usual haul: lettuce, sweet basil, a brainy-looking head of radicchio, some walnut-sized red rose potatoes and a pound and a half of fresh tuna. I ran into Pasadena neighbors, friends from church, the man I lived with 10 years ago. Every child younger than 10 had to stop and pet my little dog.

By the time I’d made my rounds of the vendors, my knapsack was full. As a last stop, I bought an armload of flowers and headed home, plotting dinner: a nicoise salad with charred red tuna, red oak leaf and butter lettuce, fresh boiled potatoes. I caught sight of my reflection in Launderland’s window with dog, bulging knapsack and arms filled with flowers. I looked like some kind of happy hiking Miss Congeniality.

I have been making this excursion on and off for 10 years, ever since the very first market was held at the Villa Parke Center. I was living in a bungalow abutting the park that year, and I remember watching in amazement on that first day as 17 farmers pulled up and began selling produce off the backs of their trucks.

The Villa Parke Market was only the second such market in Southern California--the first was in Gardena--and I’d never seen anything like it.

Having been born in the early ‘50s, I grew up on supermarket produce: graded, waxed fruits and vegetables arranged in plump, perfectly symmetrical pyramids--all very pretty and oh so hygienic. At this outdoor market, beets, lettuce, carrots and greens were heaped on tables; it looked like a vegetable rummage sale.

I could hardly believe that this kind of marketing was legal , but I was delighted. In my college years, I’d lived in rural North Carolina and Iowa. I’d raised goats and fresh vegetables. Here in Pasadena, I missed the freshness and flavor of the milk and produce that could never be found in stores. But that’s how the produce I found at the Farmers’ Market looked: home-grown.

I remember the market’s first few weeks quite well. The whole neighborhood (which at the time was made up mostly of low-income blacks, Latinos and senior citizens) turned out to shop. There were kids and babies in strollers and old people with canes tottering about. Many women with plastic woven shopping bags on their arms, as if they’d been coming to such a marketplace all their lives.

I remember, in turn, accumulating and trying to manage all the little brown paper sacks that held my purchases--this was before the ubiquitous, currently vilified, non-biodegradable plastic sack. At that first market, I bought some Valencia oranges that weren’t quite sweet, and a few of the season’s first apricots and cling peaches, which were difficult to slice. I was disappointed by the lack of tomatoes, although bushels of them arrived within weeks. I bought lemons and Haas avocados and dark, mineral-rich honeys.

As summer progressed, there were melons and nectarines, freestone and white Babcock peaches, string beans, cucumbers and zucchini. I remember the stir when the first sweet corn arrived. All the prices were low, lower than the grocery stores.

But what I remember most keenly of the market’s first few months was a sense that with its fresh, imperfect produce and odd assortment of farmers and its enormous appeal to the neighborhood, this market was altogether too non-commercial: too human, too earthy, too ethnic, too countercultural, too hopeful , and therefore far too good to last.

I left Pasadena in 1981. When I returned in 1987 I was amazed to discover that despite my forebodings the Villa Parke Center Market had been held, rain and shine, without interruption since my exit.

In fact, the market celebrated its 10th anniversary this June. The same two women who got it started, Betty Hamilton and Gretchen Sterling, are still there every week. One or the other can be heard at 10 o’clock sharp belting out, “The market’s opennnn!!!!”

A few weeks ago I found Betty and Gretchen sitting on the tailgate of Betty’s white truck while the farmers were setting up their stands. It was a good day to be in Pasadena, the first few morning hours of a Santa Ana condition, so clear that you could actually make out trees growing on the mountains.

Gretchen, a petite, very tan, cheerful woman with short blonde hair, said she’d been on the staff of the Neighborhood Center in Villa Parke 10 years ago when the Interfaith Hunger Coalition received a grant to start farmers’ markets in the state. “The markets were designed to help low-income neighborhoods and small farmers,” she said. She went into a partnership with Betty, a community organizer, who’s a tall, handsome woman, also very tan, with a frankly friendly, open face. The two women got this market off the ground with some of the grant money. Today, operating as a small nonprofit organization, they run five Certified Farmers Markets.

They have agreed to what is essentially “job share,” since running the markets amounts to too much work for one person to do and not enough income to support two people. Farmers are assessed 5% of their daily take--on the honor system. (Gretchen claims that most farmers are on the generous side.)

After the women pay their own salaries and expenses, the rest of the profits go into community programs. The Pasadena markets fund youth activities. The Monrovia market’s proceeds go into the Downtown Merchants Assn. account. “We have to give the money to a committee for distribution,” said Betty. “Otherwise, we’d be giving it away all over the place, whenever we saw a need, which is everywhere.” Last year, their markets generated $20,000 in community funds.

The Villa Parke Market is an open market, which means that any farmer who’s certified can drive on in and set up. Other markets, such as the one held in Victory Park Saturday mornings, are limited in space and require reservations.

To be certified by the county agriculture inspector, participating farmers must show that they grow their own produce. There are rumors that some farmers lease land to pass inspection, but don’t actually farm it; instead, they buy from the produce market downtown. Gretchen and Betty say this happens rarely. “We’ve been doing this so long, we know everyone, where they farm, what their crops are. We don’t have to do much policing at all.”

At one point, Betty excused herself, walked into a wide-open space within range of most of the vendors and yelled: “The market’s open!”

Men, women and children of various ages and backgrounds strolled by, shopping and looking at one another. The neighborhood has altered radically in the last 10 years. Today, there were very few blacks, and not very many Latinos. While there was still a good mix of characters, white, middle-class housewifes and white retirees predominated.

In a world where soft fruits are flown in from 10,000 miles away and Burger King takes credit cards, Farmers’ Markets customers have been re-educated to eat seasonally and to carry cash. They’re also freed from supermarket standards of cosmetic perfection--i.e. appearance and uniformity. There’s no telling what can be found here. Where else will an urban child see two carrots that have grown around each other? or Siamese-twin potatoes? Where else can you buy arugula that’s gone to seed (the little yellow flowers, it turns out, are pretty and delicious)?

A woman customer approaches and asks if a pair of sunglasses was turned in last week. They weren’t. But, Betty tells her, the lost-and-found has a great collection of keys, canes and crutches. “The keys and canes I understand,” said Betty. “But how do people forget their crutches? Yet it’s happened more times than you can imagine.”

After I’d sat with Betty and Gretchen for an hour or so, an old familiar dread began to well up inside me. I began to fear that if I didn’t start shopping immediately, my favorite stand would be sold out.

There are several stands I patronize regularly. I buy flowers every week from Tosh Ishibashi; apricots, peaches, Asian pears or oranges (depending on what’s in season) from Jim Reiger of Orosi. But I always start at the stand of one particular lettuce vendor whom I called for years, before I learned her name, “the Japanese woman” (she turned out to have a Korean husband). Friends and I rendezvoused at the Japanese woman’s stand, which was characterized by a blue tarp. When my neighbor and I walked to the market together, we always started shopping at the Japanese woman’s; her produce was my point of focus in the market, the one imperative in my shopping. I hated it when I’d get to the market later in the day and she’d be gone--sold out.

In my opinion, Sumiko Kim sold the best lettuce, striker beans, tomatoes, arugula, kohlrabi, radicchio and sweet corn. Often, she was mobbed. Her stand was the one place in the market where I have been butted in front and elbowed away, and where I myself might have done some discreet elbowing. At times, when the crowd grew thick and demanding, one of her customers might slip behind the table and bag, weigh and sell right alongside her.

I never became friendly with Sumiko, although once or twice we’d be exchanging bags or money and she’d look up and say, “Oh, it’s you.” But my salads, and then, as if by contagion, the salads of my friends, tasted and looked a certain, distinct way, because of Sumiko’s excellent varieties of red oak leaf, butter, butter crunch and red romaine lettuce.

And then she disappeared. The market moved from one area of the park to the soccer field in the north. I came late a few times, several weeks passed and I didn’t see her. Well, I thought, that’s the end of salads as I knew them. I actually stopped going to the market for several months.

One Saturday morning, a friend took me to the Burbank farmer’s market, and I found the same grade of good red oak leaf lettuce and arugula there from a young man named Jon. I saw him again, shortly, at the Villa Parke market, and this time he was under a telltale blue tarp. His mother, he told me, had retired. After eight years of selling lettuce and other produce in Certified Farmers’ Markets, she’d had enough. He was taking her place.

Recently, Jon invited me up to see the fields he and his father, Jack Kim, farm with the help of one employee, Jesus. I found the seven-plus acres where Highway 118 crosses 126, close to the tiny town of Saticoy in the beautiful, notoriously fertile Oxnard Plain. Once a patchwork of citrus groves and row crops, this flat alluvial fan of the Santa Clara River has become more and more paved with tract housing, town-sized trailer parks, mini-marts and mini-malls. Still, with a certain selectivity of vision, one can look to the dramatic Santa Clara Mountains, the remaining fields across the wide valley, the soft light and the big diffuse clouds rolling from the west and find the compelling calm beauty of an older, more rural California.

The Kims’ place is no back-yard operation but a small, no-nonsense farm. The land is flat and slopes slightly. The soil is very dark, which sets off the bright greens, reds and bronzes of lettuce, the gray greens of broccoli and other cabbage family members. We met in the equipment area, among sections of sprinkler pipe, tractor attachments and spray rigs--the Kims’ lettuce is not certifiably organic because they use some chemical fertilizers.

The crop rows are planted east to west, the direction of the wind, which either blows cool from the ocean or warm from the desert. As we walked out into the fields, the moist soil filled the soles of our sneakers and continued to accumulate until we were walking on heavy mud wedges, which we kicked off against sprinkler pipes when we came to them.

As we clumped along, Jon, who’s 24, told me how he managed restaurants and sold cars until his father, who wanted to retire, asked him to come into the small family operation.

Now, on market days, he and Jesus meet in the fields at 6 in the morning and cut lettuce. They use a lettuce knife, which has a squared-off end for severing the head from its root and a 12-inch blade for trimming away extraneous exterior leaves. Whatever roots and leaves are left on the ground are plowed back into the soil for the nutrients in them, to be used by the next year’s crop.

For a smaller market, such as the one at Villa Parke, they’ll cut 10 crates of lettuce, or 240 heads. For the larger market in Burbank, they’ll cut twice as much. After the lettuce is crated, it’s washed down with water, which cools it and keeps it fresh.

Between them, Jon and his father go to six or seven markets a week. On Thursdays, John sells at two markets--Redondo Beach in the morning and Pasadena City Hall in the afternoon--and arrives home at 9 or 10 at night.

“This may not be an easy life,” said Jon. “But it’s a nice life.”

We came to a place where rows of healthy, blue-green kale boiled out of the ground. Jon paused, laughed a little to himself and recounted an incident earlier in the day.

He’d been packing up to leave the market when a woman came and picked up a bunch of kale. “How much?” she wanted to know.

“50 cents,” Jon replied.

She frowned. “It’s 35 cents down the way,” she said.

Jon was tired, ready to go. “You should go back and buy it then. That’s OK. You won’t hurt my feelings.”

The woman kept contemplating the kale in herhand. “But yours is so much nicer,” she said.