A farmers market a day in Connecticut: Pigs, library buses, Israeli cuisine, face-painting, beautiful produce and more
Any day of the week in Connecticut, in one of the 169 towns in the state, there is likely to be a farmers market.
It might be big, sprawling and carnival-like, like the spectacle that is the Sunday market at Nathan Hale Homestead in Coventry, or like the music-filled Saturday morning gatherings, a social hub for people and dogs, in Arbor Park in Ellington.
Or it might be small, with only a few of the ubiquitous white tents, like the Wednesday market in Old Saybrook in a parking lot off Main Street, and Friday afternoons in East Hartford in front of the library.
We visited a farmers market each day of the week in Connecticut and talked to people who made soap, people who raise pigs in the woods, vegetable farmers, beef farmers, people who sell potato chips, people who make gourmet Israeli cuisine and people who sell Siamese fighting fish and bearded dragons.
This is who and what we found:
Monday
Of all the days of the week, Monday is the slowest for farmers markets. “I think it’s because everybody’s already done their shopping for the week,” said Derrick Bedward.
Still, Bedward persists. On Mondays, he pitches a tent at KNOX in the Frog Hollow section of Hartford to sell his organic bok choy, chives, sage, basil, lettuce, peppers, scallions, mint and callaloo. This week, his was the only tent, shared with fellow farmer David Joseph.
“There used to be more people. They like going where crowds are, like Coventry, on busy days. But people here need what I sell. Let them go there. I will stay here,” he said.
In his hometown of Clarendon, Jamaica, he grew up among the fresh produce. “It influenced me a lot. It gave me motivation to do agriculture,” he said.
He studied urban agriculture at Capitol Community College and did fieldwork at KNOX. Today, he is among 300 gardeners who work in 21 KNOX gardens throughout the city.
Patrick Doyle, executive director of KNOX, said in its larger-scale farming program, 15 KNOX farmers grow for clients including the city’s public schools. Bedward is an alumnus of that program.
Bedward’s crops lean toward what he ate as a child. “You make rice and peas, you need scallions. You make oxtail, you need scallions. You make curry chicken, you need scallions,” he said. He is especially proud of his callaloo. “People need it fresh, not in a can,” he said.
Bedward also brings his greens to the city’s Homestead market, at 255 Homestead Ave. on Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Promise Zone market at 425 Woodland St. on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to noon. What he doesn’t sell he donates to city food pantries.
“People should have access to clean, healthy food,” he said.
KNOX Frog Hollow Farmers Market is at 75 Laurel St. in Hartford on Monday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. knoxhartford.org/farmersmarket.
Tuesday
The first thing you see — because you can’t miss it — at Plainfield Farmers Market is the large blue school bus. The Plainfield market, which runs Tuesdays from 4 to 6 p.m. in the parking lot of the Early Childhood Center, is on the smaller side, with maybe six vendors.
The bus is a mobile library sponsored by the Plainfield school system, filled with children’s books and a steady stream of small customers on a late June afternoon.
“They come in, get a book. We like them to bring them back but there’s not a check-out system or anything,” said Myra Ambrogi, the family resource center coordinator at Plainfield Public Schools. “We get them back halfway through the school year. The books belong to the bus. We stock them through the school.
“Our former superintendent, this was his baby, something he really wanted.”
“And,” she added, “if we can get some young people to know where their food comes, that’s even better.”
The Plainfield market is small but the customers are loyal, said Amy Burroughs, who owns B-Z-B Farms in Canterbury with her husband Andrew.
“This is one of the oldest farmers markets in the northeast corner,” Burroughs said. “It’s been around since the ‘80s.”
Burroughs, whose farm primarily raises beef, said she’s at a market every day of the week and sometimes two in one day, in Putnam, Plainfield, Canterbury, Brooklyn, Lisbon, Killingly, Ashford and Voluntown.
“This is one of our more popular locations,” she said. “We do have more vendors expected later in the season. We have a nice variety. Not everyone has a greenhouse so as produce comes in, people join us.
“Our customers are loyal. They come every week, so I know how many cows to butcher, [another vendor] knows how many tomatoes to bring, she knows what she’s going to sell. Once the market is over for the season, my customers shop at my farm stand all winter. I know I can sustain. I find I sell more at the smaller ones.”
Plainfield Farmers Market, Plainfield Early Childhood Center parking lot, 651 Norwich Road in Plainfield, Tuesdays 4 to 6 p.m.
Wednesday
Old Saybrook has two markets, one on Wednesdays and one on Saturday. There were only four tents and not a lot of foot traffic on the last Wednesday in June in the parking lot off Main Street. The Saturday market typically has more vendors and shoppers.
Tamara Berry of Groton is in her first year selling her handmade soap at Old Saybrook.
It started as a hobby for her but then it got a little out of control.
“I’m a pretty artistic person,” Berry said. “I used to do knitting and crocheting and painting. I thought, ‘This could be a new medium for me.’ Friends and family wanted to buy it.
“It got to the point where I was like, ‘I can’t use this much soap, but I want to make more soap.’ We had stacks of soap everywhere. I could make 30 bars at a time. And I can’t use 30 bars at a time.”
Berry said it takes about two hours to make soap, depending on how intricate the designs are. She and her husband Hayden Burger, who helps her make the soap and sell it, wanted their business to be sustainable so they wrap their soap in tissue paper rather than plastic.
“We used to do plastic,” she said. “The bags are paper. Sustainability is super super important to us. I don’t want to create more waste for the sake of my products.”
Old Saybrook Farmers Market, 210 Main St. in Old Saybrook, Wednesdays 3 to 6 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. oldsaybrookfarmersmarket.com.
Thursday
Darren Cugno is passionate about his pigs.
Cugno, who owns and operates Cugno’s Farm in Colchester, raises pigs in the woods on his farm. He has a stand at the Wethersfield Farmers Market on Thursday afternoon. The tables are filled with vegetables and the coolers with eggs and pork chops and bacon.
“If you went and observed pigs in the wild, they live in the woods,” Cugno said. “Everything we raise at our farm, we try to mimic nature. We put our chickens in the pasture, cows are on grass.
“Not only does it keep them healthy but [the pigs] find things in the woods, they forage, they constantly got their nose in the ground. It handles all of our manure management problems; we keep rotating them through the woods. We don’t have to deal with cleaning out pigpens. The pigs don’t smell. You go to most pig farms and you smell the farm before you see it. We’re trying to work with nature.”
Cugno, a first-generation farmer, has 29 pigs this year.
“The way most pigs are raised, it’s literally animal cruelty,” he said. “If you look at the factory setups they do pigs in, they never see the light of day, they never stick their nose in the dirt, they live in a tiny little confined area.
“There’s a big difference with our beef and the store bought beef – but the pork is a completely different product. You could take one of our pork chops and put it on the grill and put nothing but salt and pepper on it and it’s out of this world.”
Wethersfield Farmers Market, 220 Hartford Ave. in Wethersfield, Thursdays, 3 to 6 p.m. wfmarket.org.
Friday
East Hartford is a small farmers markets. Its regulars are two farmers, Unity Farm in Manchester and Wright’s Orchard in Tolland.
But the market punches above its weight in the area of community wellness. Griffin Health has have set up tents statewide offering vaccinations since they became available, and come to this market often. “We’ll keep doing it until the job is done,” a nurse stated.
UConn Health offers breast cancer awareness and surveys about community health needs. East Hartford Black Caucus registers people to vote and offers community-building opportunities.
Laurence Burnsed, director of health and social services, who runs the market, said other organizations such as Community Renewal Team and town social services will come to offer services.
”The pandemic made us re-evaluate the opportunity we saw for our farmers market. We saw a need to make available to residents the broad scope of our support services,” Burnsed said.
Still, people go to farmers markets for the food. Unity sells corn, tomatoes, squash, kale, Brussels sprouts, onions, savoy cabbage and hot peppers.
Wright’s sells parsley, basil, squash, blueberries and lettuces including redleaf, buttercrunch and romaine. Later in the season, she sells peaches, blackberries, nectarines and plums.
The market is popular with residents of nearby senior housing, who walk there. “We have a loyal following,” Joycelyn Wright said.
East Hartford Farmers Market is in front of Raymond Public Library at 840 Main St., on Fridays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. through Oct. 28. easthartfordct.gov/health/pages/east-hartford-farmers-market.
Saturday
Every week, Juston Archambault brings his daughter, Lyla, to the farmers market in Ellington, where they live. All around them are vendors of produce, meat, baked goods, ethnic food, ice cream, seafood, macarons. Archambault’s Zion’s Betta World stands out. He sells pretty colored betta fish — red, blue, orange, yellow — in glass bowls, filled with bright pebbles.
“We only sell the male fish. They have prettier fins. We like to educate people about the fish,” Archambault said. “This is a hobby for me. ... I wouldn’t want to own a pet store — the overhead. I like the farmers market because you can meet people.”
He and Lyla also sell bearded dragons, babies and fully grown. The babies pose like supermodels in a little aquarium.
Next door to their booth is Yalla Organic, an outdoor offshoot of Yalla Organic Hummus & Grill, the Fairfield Mediterranean restaurant. Idan Mitchell, the son of the Fairfield chef Ronen Yur, runs the farmers market booth.
“We’re from Israel. This is authentic food,” Mitchell said. “The idea is to create a healthy, delicious experience.”
Mitchell said the farmers market outreach began in the early days of the pandemic, when a lot of people didn’t want to eat indoors. Now he goes regularly to Ellington, Stonington, Fairfield and Old Greenwich markets.
Diane Trueb is the volunteer who has run the Ellington market since 2012. It was small then. Then she visited Coventry’s market. “I was overwhelmed. I’m like, wait a minute, if they can do this, so can we,” she said. Now, 40 vendors gather weekly.
The market has weekly themes — artists, pet adoption, etc. — and programs to teach kids to make healthy choices about nutrition. Kids’ activities include the “Zucchini 500 Drag Race,” a visit from “Dr. Bugman” and an “Edible Animals Contest.”
Ellington Farmers Market, Arbor Park, 31 Arbor Way in Ellington, Saturdays 9 a.m. to noon. ellingtonfarmersmarket.org.
Sunday
Paul Desrochers is the last original vendor from the first Coventry Farmers Market, which started near the Glass Museum on Route 44 in 2004, then expanded to Nathan Hale Homestead, where it has become a tourist attraction of sorts on Sunday mornings in the summer and early fall.
Desrochers owns 18th Century Purity Farms, two farms in Moosup and Plainfield. The Plainfield farm, Hall Homestead, has been in his wife’s family since the late 1800s.
His signature crop is heirloom apples, which he grows on the Moosup farm.
“I searched the country to find the varieties I wanted,” said Desrochers, who is 76 and works on both farms every day from sunup to sundown when he’s not at the Coventry or Stonington farmers markets. “When I started, I remember my grandfather’s farm orchard, he had Greenings and Russets and Baldwins and I wanted them. I planted them and I said, ‘Well, I’ll probably never make a nickel on them but I don’t care.’ As it turns out, I probably do more with the heirlooms than I do with the more modern fruits.
“This market and Stonington, they have good curiosity.”
Coventry has about 60 vendors, which sell everything from giant pretzels (the Hartford Baking Company) to Italian ice (Chet’s Italian Ice) to mango habanero turkey sausage (Ekonk Hill Turkey Farm), as well as food trucks.
Coventry Farmers Market, Sundays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Nathan Hale Homestead, 2299 South St. in Coventry. Coventry Farmers Market at Hale Homestead
Lori Riley can be reached at lriley@courant.com. Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com.
