Let’s plant the seeds for a year-round farmers market

My first job was selling produce at a marketplace. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, the center square in my high school town of Naestved, Denmark, was turned into an outdoor market, no matter what time of year.

I worked for a guy named Mogens, who at the time was 40ish, single and volunteered patches of his balding head for experimental hair transplantation treatments. Mogens ran an orchard with his family and on market day, he parked a truck full of fruits and vegetables in the middle of the square at 5 a.m.

Everything had to be put out in a certain way, on tables and in boxes, and about 8 a.m. the first shoppers would show up.

It was an all-weather job, and there was no shelter. In the summer we got sunburned, and during winter the lettuce froze, every leaf turning into a crinkly sheet of ice. We told shoppers to put the lettuce in cold water to thaw it, “and you can’t tell the difference at all.”

In hindsight, that probably wasn’t true.

We unpacked bananas with weird yellow spiders in the boxes. In spring, the first local potatoes and strawberries were praised and celebrated. We sold lemons to go with the fish and radishes to go with the cheese also sold at the market. Christmas season brought tiny red apples and bright orange tangerines, followed by pale fat leeks and hard heads of kale and cabbage in January.

I kept the job all through high school.

So marketplaces have a special place in my heart. I am thankful to the people who run the farmers markets in our area – they are an incredible bonus to our neighborhoods, and I shop there as often as I can – yet I keep longing for an actual year-round marketplace.

Remember the Spokane Marketplace and how it moved from location to location while trying to stay afloat?

I first found the marketplace at Division and Riverside when I moved here in ‘93.

There’s still a sign on the retaining wall there, proudly announcing the home of the Spokane Marketplace. But in ‘94, the market lost its lease and moved to the north shore of the river inside Riverfront Park. Crowds dwindled. Vendors disappeared. A complicated migration with several stops ended on North Ruby Street and Desmet Avenue in 2002.

Don’t tell me we can’t support a year-round marketplace here in Spokane. Of course we can. Just look at how crowded the farmers Market on Second gets in the summer – the desire is here, the drive is here, the customers are here. We just need a good location.

From an economic development standpoint, a year-round marketplace would become a tourist attraction that Avista can’t turn on and off at its pleasure.

A sound marketplace can be an excellent business incubator. It can serve as an easily reached outlet for local farmers, bakers and artisans, and, if located in an appropriate facility, it can play host to community meetings, music and shows both big and small.

Marketplaces can’t pay a lot of rent, and until they are established they often can’t get HUD or other grants – so someone would have to let the marketplace in from the cold, without charging an arm and a leg. But just imagine what a legacy that would leave you, here in Spokane, if you gave the marketplace its real home.

Before every square foot of available real estate in this town is turned into condos or surface parking lots, let’s see if we can’t make a year-round public market a priority.

Suggestions? Comments? A location? I can’t wait to hear from you. It’s possible. I know it’s possible.