Pike Place Market

Last year the Pike Place Market got into the neighborhood farmers market game. Conventional wisdom says “but isn’t the Market in the farmers market game already”?

True enough. Pike Place is in fact the first and longest running neighborhood farmers market in all of Seattle.

Pictured above: Tiny's Organics nectarines, warming in the sun

Living and working in the Market is definitely a unique experience – and one that admittedly, on occasion, I have to remind myself is a privilege.  Sometimes I think it’s rather like what living in The White House might feel like.  Millions of people a year are traipsing through “your house” to get a closer look, and sometimes even pose for photos on your front porch (this happened to me just this past Saturday).

I spent some time today talking with Joshua Craft who just last week started selling produce from his farm “Nooksack Nine” in Everson. His parents, Ben Craft and Gretchen Hoyt, are our second most tenured farmers. They have owned and operated Alm Hill Gardens since Joshua was a child and he has grown up selling at the Market. He had a surplus of raspberries this year and decided to come back down to Pike Place where juicy berries fly off the farm tables.

For many in the Pacific Northwest, a love of fresh fruits and vegetables date back to childhood memories - maybe eating watermelon at a backyard barbeque with friends or snacking on home garden grown carrots pealed and cut by a loving parent. Personally I remember raiding the Asian plum and Bing cherry trees next to the fence line at minimum once a day during the harvest season.

Sidhu Farms is back!  Look for them Tuesdays at City Hall Plaza (10am-2pm), Thursdays at Cascade (3pm-7pm) and seven days a week at Pike Place (9am-5pm).  Sidhu has been a Pike Place Market farmer since 1999 and farms on over 30 acres in Puyallup, Washington.  Currently they are tabling fresh raspberries, strawberries, tomato starts, rhubarb and jam.