It isn’t local, but while on vacation I happened upon a downtown farmer’s market. The French Broad Food Co-op Tailgate Market is Asheville’s original, all-organic tailgate market, and they just so happened to be operating that Wednesday as they have since 1990. The market features freshly picked organic vegetables, fruits and herbs as well as local honey, wood-fired brick oven breads, vegan and non-vegan baked treats, eggs, pies, goat cheeses and locally raised meats. The market is located at 76 Biltmore Avenue, next to the French Broad Food Co-op, which is kind of like Sevananda here in ATL. The co-op even has a little area for all local organic produce with the names of the farms on chalkboard labels. The market basically sets up in the parking lot of a green building materials store and consisted of about twenty vendors and their iconic white tents.
We stolled around the market, checking out the selections of late summer fruits and vegetables including apples, pears, squash, carrots and corn. We bought some broccoli, eggplant and herbs for our cabin dinner. I talked to the person who was there from the local goat farm selling her cheese. We talked about ash cheese and the various reaction people have to it. We stopped and chatted with the beekeeper who showed us an antique reed beehive he had obtained from England. They used to go into the wild, chop off a piece of the hive(with the queen, I presume), then drop the chunk of hive into the straw basket and the bees would set up nest there and honeycomb it and make honey. The problem was, and the reason it became an abandoned practice, is that the only way to collect the honey was to kill the bees. 
It was very much a farmer’s market, with hardly any vendors selling jars of salsa or jelly, or insurance, or hot-water heaters. At it fit perfectly into the small-town, mainstreet ambience that part of Asheville has developed and maintained. And the town seems very focused on green, local, and organic. That is nice to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment