My Town Monday: Farmers' Market

Last Wednesday, Child #4 and I dropped off Child #2 and then Child #3 at swim practice. We decided we'd had enough of multiplication times tables and Accelerated Reader points and third grade homework in general.

So, we threw caution to the wind and headed to a farmers' market IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCHOOL WEEK.

Child #4 scopes out the wares.

Yes, we were the gutsy mother-daughter duo wandering the stalls and scooping up samples while the backpack languished on the floor of our van.

We ended up buying tomatoes (grown near the Carlsbad Flower Fields), smoked tuna and smoked sea bass fished from our own harbor and jam (canned down the street from the Dennys where I meet with my critique group).

Of course, we chatted with everyone and met someone who used to be neighbors with Nicholas Sparks' childhood buddy. We heard of a nearby restaurant which only serves organic food grown/raised locally (possible fodder for a MTM post). We learned the names of several flowers used in the bouquets.

And to round off today's MTM post, here's a little trivia about farmers' markets:

-Before his fatal auto crash on Sept. 30, 1955, people believe James Dean ate breakfast at the farmers market located at Third and Fairfax in L.A.

-There are over 500 farmers' markets each year in California. Eighty of them are in Los Angeles.

-Farmers' markets can be found on several college campuses including University of Southern California, University of California Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, Stanford, Harvard, Brown, Portland State, the University of Minnesota, the University of Maine and the University of Arizona.

Please pop over to Travis Erwin's blog. He's our Fearless Leader for My Town Mondays. Along with his own MTM post, he'll have a list of participants.


sources:
http://www.farmersmarketla.com/history/marketfacts.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/24/food/fo-farmer24
http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-collegemarkets4-2009mar04,0,1822524.story