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Articles
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| H Street farmers’ market blossoms again |
VOICE writes, "By AMANDA ABRAMS
Pushing strollers and bicycles, carrying cups of coffee and cutting through alleyways, young families converged on the H Street farmers’ market this past Saturday morning, celebrating the first day of the market’s season and greeting familiar faces after a long winter.
Now in its fifth year, the H Street market has become a gathering point for many residents of the H Street corridor and the larger Hill area — one that continues to swell as the neighborhood grows. Located on a city-owned parking lot between 6th and 7th streets, the market provides residents with a genuine connection to the food they put on their tables. All six vendors are direct producers of the goods they sell, from plants to produce to pork.
“We live around the corner and have been coming since the market started,” said Todd Richardson, one of the earliest arrivals. He was waiting with his two children for the opening bell to ring at 9 a.m. “It’s got good fresh food and is a great place to see people you know and hang out. We’ve gotten to know all the vendors.”"
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Diane Hoover turned from greeting the owner of Quaker Valley Orchards and agreed. A 12th Street resident, she has been patronizing the market since it opened.
“There was hardly anybody here for the first few years,” she said. “But now you should see it. People are still coming at this hour, but later, you can hardly stir them with a stick.”
The H Street market is the result of collaboration between the D.C. Office of Planning and FreshFarm Markets, a group that runs three other farmers’ markets in the District. After conducting a series of community listening sessions at churches and senior centers, the planning office determined that creating the market was one way to reignite development in the area, and recruited FreshFarm to manage the process.
But few of the neighborhood’s original residents shop at the market. Instead, its patrons are largely young, white professionals who’ve moved into the area more recently.
Bernadine Prince, co-director of FreshFarm Market and a Hill resident, acknowledged that many local residents still do not shop at the market.
“I’m proud to say, though, that we just got a grant to accept food stamps, although that won’t be ready until the end of May. And our farmers accept WIC vouchers [from the Women, Infants, and Children federal grant program],” she added.
Nonetheless, the vouchers aren’t used much. One of the farmers at the market said he received fewer than 30 last year.
Across the street, in Murray’s grocery store, golden delicious apples are on sale for almost half the cost of the apples at the farmers’ market and collard greens are 89 cents a pound, about a third the cost of the organic spring greens grown by Blueberry Hill Farm. But nothing is local, organic or particularly seasonal.
Hill residents Lilly and Laverne, who declined to give their last names, were shopping at Murray’s on Saturday and praised the products there. “This is just as fresh” as the farmers’ market food, they asserted. “And you can’t beat Murray’s prices,” said Laverne. “Poor people don’t care about organic. Poor people can’t afford organic.”
Gail Williams, another Murray’s customer, wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t heard about the market, but was interested in finding out more. “I might have to take a look at it,” she said. “You’ll find a lot of people here don’t know nothing about it.”
Back at the market, Donné Malloy, manager of the H Street farmers’ market, surveyed the scene with satisfaction.
“I’ve been seeing people on the subway all week, telling me, ‘We can’t wait for the market to open!’ I’m so happy to see so many people on the first day.”
She added, “I’d like to see more diversity among shoppers here. I always tell the story about a customer who was looking at eggs from here. She said, ‘I can go to Murray’s and pay $1.50 for eggs, and here they’re $3 or $4.’ So I gave her the money out of my pocket so she could try our eggs. She came back the next week and said to me, “I don’t know what I’ve been eating before this.’”
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Posted on May 13, 2008 16:28pm.
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