Garfield Park Neighborhood Market

“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, exclusive to the South. Full of fiber, protein and antioxidants, lady peas have a creamy texture and sweet taste. There are also mustard greens, slick leaf mustard greens and kale.

Like Mansfield’s Kitchen, Ms. Gina’s Medley is another legacy vendor of pickled okra and turnips, baked zucchini bread bites, banana bread and butter cookies. Her grandfather came up in the Great Migration and housed the family in a large mansion. Even though Ms. Gina lived in Oak Park, she still owned the property and wanted to become a community gardener on it.

Taylor’s own garden will have garlic, purple and white cabbage; collard, mustard and turnip greens; bell peppers and hot peppers: poblano and Scotch bonnets; watermelon and cantaloupe. There’s a big patch of strawberries that somebody had to move; Taylor and her husband had just purchased a whole city lot for $1.

“Lots of gardeners feel gardens are part of the family. They feed it and weed it so it can produce food you can eat.”

There’s plenty for shoppers from outside the neighborhood, Taylor says.

“It’s not taking food away. That’s the way we support our garden network. We have to do this project every year: make compost, raised beds. The City does not provide it. The way to make it sustainable is to sell our produce in our community so anyone can buy it so we can start this process all over again. But after July, you’d better come early, because the seniors will have their coupons and will wait for me to get there. They want their peas, greens, okra.”