Naperville farmers markets gearing up for a new season

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Billy Yoakam helps Lyn Pewitt (right) with her purchase Saturday at the Freedom Commons Summer Market. Pewitt bought flowers from the We Grow Dreams booth. | Jeff Cagle / For Sun-Times Media

LAND O’ PLENTY

These weekly Naperville farmers markets will be open through the growing season.

Riverview Farmstead Market — Book Road between 111th and 119th Streets. Thursdays, June 2 through September, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.; www.connectwithnature.org or 815-886-1467.

Naperville Farmer’s Market Association — Fifth Avenue Station parking lot. Saturdays, June through October, 7 a.m. - noon; www.naperville.il.us/farmersmarket.aspx or 630-369-5638.

Freedom Commons Summer Market — Freedom Drive and Diehl Road. Saturdays, mid-May through October, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.; www.freedomcommons.com or 630-527-0900, Ext. 106.

For a complete list of the area’s farmers markets, visit www.napersun.com.

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Updated: November 16, 2011 1:20AM

You might have to wait a few days longer for that sublime first bite of just-picked sweet corn. Area farmers are seeing slight delays in the season’s planting, but they’re not too worried.

“It’s not been too bad. It started out cool and wet, but it got better,” said Steve Theis, a Yorkville grower whose Evergreen Farm raises vegetables, fruit and flowers sold at the venue hosted by the Naperville Farmers Market Association.

The weekly venue for locally grown goods will return to the parking lot of the Fifth Avenue Station at 7 a.m. Saturday, continuing through the last week of October.

The season typically starts small, with only spring’s most cold-tolerant crops initially coming to market. Theis and his crew of employees and family members will be bringing asparagus, sugar snaps, radishes, rhubarb and flowers. Strawberries will lag by a week or so, he said, and the sweet corn also is likely to be a little behind last year’s first picking, which happened around the Fourth of July.

More than two dozen growers and food producers turn out for the weekend market. This year, nearly all of the faces will look familiar to patrons who have shopped there before.

“All of the farmers are making it back, which is good,” market manager Kathy Mortensen said. “We always like to see that, that we didn’t lose anybody.”

Just one new vendor is on tap, a seller of coffee and tea drinks who snapped up the sole available spot that opened when a grower from the Dubuque area retired.

So far, Mortensen hasn’t heard of the snowy winter and late spring doing serious harm to the farmers’ anticipated summer yield.

“They’ve been happy with the rain,” she said. “And they were really happy with the snow, because that helps their crops.”

Saturday morning also brings the market at Freedom Commons, off Diehl Road on the city’s north side. Along with growers of fresh produce and flowers, local nonprofits are selling retail goods to benefit their organizations. The market’s second season launched May 14.

While more will be added as the weeks pass, the fund-raiser items available at this point include fairly traded “Heart of the Brew” coffee, sold ground and in whole bean form by Arbor Vitae, which is donating its proceeds to Misericordia Heart of Mercy.

Loaves & Fishes Community Pantry is offering its “Culinary Comforts” cookbook, and representatives of Animals Deserving of Proper Treatment (ADOPT) are selling treats for pets and their human friends, plus items bearing the shelter’s logo.

A newcomer also is headed to the lineup of local markets, this one setting up on Thursday mornings on the city’s far south end. After a two-month trial late last summer, the Forest Preserve District of Will County will kick off its first full season of hosting the Riverview Farmstead Market at 9 a.m. Thursday on the historic farm off Book Road between 111th and 119th streets.

Harry Klinkhamer, interpretive facility coordinator for the district, said word of mouth helped get the pilot project rolling.

“We had a pretty good steady audience of locals who were coming in,” he said.

A combination of sustenance source and history lesson, the market will spotlight farm life in a one-hour segment geared toward kids from 10 to 11 a.m. each week.

“What’s really exciting, too, is we’re also going to be doing what we call ‘third Thursdays,’” Klinkhamer said, adding that extra programming is planned on those dates.

Hayrack rides will be the draw on June 16, a petting zoo is planned on July 21, and a threshing demonstration is on the calendar for Aug. 18. Also coming out on the third Thursday of each month will be performers from Naper Settlement who will offer demonstrations of farm tasks from bygone days, such as butter churning and the making of soap.

“It really ties into the mission that we have developed for the site, where we are trying to reconnect people to the county’s agricultural heritage,” Klinkhamer said.