Portland’s first Saturday Farmer’s Market opened a couple weeks ago.  The weather was due to be beautiful this weekend (well, beautiful if you’re an Oregonian living in perpetual chill and rain for months, and anything over 60 is shorts weather if the sun peeps out), and so we decided to head over to the PSU market and see what there was to see.  We hadn’t taken the kidlet to one at all last year, so it was re-new to him, and a good excuse to get out, get some sun, and burn off some energy.

I wasn’t expecting to do much shopping for myself.  There isn’t much in season right now in Oregon.  The ground’s only been thawed a short time, and the torrential rains aren’t exactly crop-friendly.  Even if we’d had a perfect late winter and early spring, you wouldn’t see much this early in April.  There were (naturally) daffodils, but even the tulips weren’t popping up as you’d normally see right now.  So, as expected, there were a lot of booths with non-produce — locally produced honeys, meat products, dried flowers, starter plants for hopeful gardeners, things like that. 

Still, there were a suprising number of booths with veggies.  Though little of it is commercially grown, its the (super) short harvest season for the foragers – morels, fiddlehead ferns, stinging nettles and the like.  None of which I have ever personally used, and I was tempted.  I love trying new things!  But I could see the faces of the kidlet and hubbie if I served them a plate of fiddleheads or unfamiliar greens.  And morels?  11$+ for a bare handful, when the two of them refused to eat just plain ol regular sauteed crimini mushrooms not two days ago?  Naaah, we’ll pass 😉

So we mostly let the kidlet lead the way, wandering around and seeing what caught his attention, occasionally steering him away from the center quad which was still a teeming mass of mud.  He wanted to buy a bunch of daffodils (and in true Charlie Brown fashion, picked the most bedraggled bunch in the most bedraggled booth we’d seen all day), and accosted the balloon animal man for a light saber, but otherwise was content to roam around.  He even passed by the booth with elaborate and delicious looking cupcakes without a single tug on my sleeve! 😉


Posted by in Brain Dump