This Week at the South Durham Farmers' Market

This Week:

• Open Saturday 8 am - Noon Rain or Shine at Greenwood Commons, 5410 HWY 55
Music By Robinson Lee Earle from 10 am - 11 am 
• Education on Get Your Grass Off Gas! With Durham Sustainability from 9 am - 12 pm
• In season: onions, asperagus, herbs, flowers, cheeses, root vegetables, bread, tomatoes

Keeping Things Fresh.

While we always say that the best way to enjoy fresh produce from SDFM is to take it home and eat it as quickly as possible, we know that this simply isn't realistic for a lot of folks - and we've heard countless stories about how shoppers like to keep their fresh produce...well, fresh.

Other shoppers, on the other hand, find it incredibly tricky to keep their beautiful SDFM goods ready and waiting for a Thursday night dinner - but fret no more!  Our Market Manager, Ben Fillippo has shared some tips and tricks to get the most time out of the tenderest types of Spring produce...read more here.


Sunday is Mother's Day!
Remind Mom why you're her favorite with fresh flowers and brunch fixings from the South Durham Farmers' Market.

I Spy With My Strawberry Eye
In 1712, the French spy Amédée Frezier surreptitiously lifted six strawberry plants from a Chilean military outpost he was watching on behalf of King Louis XIV.  M. Frezier then spent four months traversing the ocean towards home, protecting said plants from the scourges of disease; salt water; and hungry sailors.  At the end of his journey, he presented his capture to his berry-loving King.  The king, recognizing the opportunity laid at his feet, immediately mated - or hybridized - the larger, more robust Chilean strawberries with the sweet, demure, difficult-to-cultivate French fraises des bois.

...and that unlikely pairing, despite it's resemblance to a tawdry romance novel, began the long lineage of garden strawberries that we enjoy today.

 To explain, those original strawberries were crossed with even more robust and predictable American varieties and then those varieties traversed the world, helping create countless hyperlocal varieties with different textures and flavor elements.  In fact, strawberries became so globally celebrated that they have been used by artists to symbolize goodness, abundance, and pleasure for centuries.

Fast forward to 1983, where a five year old with a tangle of blonde curls removes the last clandestine piece of strawberry pie from her parents’ refrigerator.  The strawberries were picked from her mother’s garden and are large and sweet and the glaze is sticky and rich.  This pie will become part of her summertime playbook for the remainder of her life.  She will spend years trying to perfectly recreate the flavors that live in her memories.  Eventually, she will stumble across this recipe, which she will make using fresh, ripe SDFM strawberries.  She will share her perfect pie with her family and friends – and she will think of the man with the ironic name and how he began the trajectory that brought her to this exact moment.

Local strawberries are the most flavorful and abundant right now, perfect for homemade pies and freezer jam.