FRIDAYS
Englewood Village Farmers Market (managed by Grow Greater Englewood)
5800 S. Halsted St., July 9 –October 15, 4–7 p.m. www.growgreater.org
L Fresh Moves Bus-Urban Growers Collective Chicago Family Health, 9199 S. Exchange Ave., 10 a.m.-noon Heartland Alliance, 5501 S. Halsted St., 12:30-2 p.m. Howard Brown Health, 1525 E. 55th St., 2:30-4 p.m.
L&M Gary Comer Youth Center
7256 S. South Chicago Ave., 3-6 p.m. June 18-October 29. Seasonally picked flowers, herbs and produce grown by Gary Comer students at market across the street from the youth center. As the season progresses, expect beans, salad mix, cooking greens, tomatoes, peppers, turnips, summer squash, herbs and more. Double value for link and IDHS senior/WIC coupons.
L &M
“We put the local in local,” says Garfield Park Neighborhood Market Manager Angela Taylor. “All of our produce is actually grown here in the community, picked the day before. Most of the entrepreneurs that participate are local.” The Garfield Park Neighborhood Market is open 10 a.m.-2 p.m. the second and fourth Saturdays of the month from June through October on the plaza of The Hatchery Chicago, right off the CTA Green Line at 135 N. Kedzie Ave. Along with the Market, the Garfield Park Garden Network has been a centerpiece of local wellness efforts since 2010. The 32-member association of local gardens maintains roughly three acres of vacant lots in the community. Managed by a resident committee that meets monthly, the network seeks to increase the availability of fresh produce in a food desert, to support service learning for local teens and to beautify previously blighted areas of the neighborhood. The garden network has a greenhouse for year-round plantings and starting seedlings. By the end of this year, it will also have an orchard, to produce fruit suited to the Chicago climate. “Yes, we are actually supplying food to the food-insecure,” Taylor said. “We’re hoping to lift up the benefit of shopping at the farmers market with the Link card.” On qualified products like honey, pickles, jams and jellies, they can receive Link bucks for produce: carrots, tomatoes, bell peppers and peas. The Garfield Park Farmers Market was on this site before construction of The Hatchery Chicago, but the new nonprofit food and beverage business incubator made Taylor feel they should take the market up a notch. Members of the Hatchery have added products like hypoallergenic bath and body products, traditional African snacks, barbeque sauces and herb-infused salts. Taylor also started to identify entrepreneurs who could cook, for value-added products. Alabamaborn Everlean Mansfield, 85, is the matriarch. She makes apple butter, peach and pear preserves that she sources from another farmers market. Other Great Migration legacy members of the Garfield Park Garden Network bring “cultural peas” that they actually grew and ate in the South: crowder, purple hull, whippoorwill, lady peas. Cooking Light.com called the latter a “rare find at farmers markets” because of their short growing season,
GArFIELD PARK
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