I was waiting to pay for shallots and strawberries at Nancy’s booth and a man a few years older than me, who had been talking to Nancy, peered at my tote bag. “The Four Eyed Frog Bookstore. In . . . There’s a bookstore in Gualala?”
“Yes,” I said, ” a good one.”
“How far is Gualala from here?”
“About ninety minutes.”
“Ninety minutes! In ninety minutes you could go to a good bookstore. In the city.”
“Or a good bookstore, I said, “in Gualala.”
Many vendors use their vividly colored produce and flowers to create art or at leat design. This time of year the market explodes with traditional autumnal colors; dark green, yellow and orange.
I was taking pictures of a basket loaded with red peppers. The woman standing next to me said she had recently come back from a trip to China and that she took many pictures of the farmers markets, for the same reason; the color the composition, the puzzle of the signs which weren’t in English. She said she probably took hundreds.
One booth has figs, fat purple apostrophes of sweetness.
The Patch is famous for tomatoes and peppers,but they also had green beans, squash and onions. Laguna farm had melons, turnips, kale and carrots. Crescent Moon farms had many varieties of pepper and several squash, and the booth next to her had potatoes.
Pick up some chicken or sausage from Gleason Farms, or beef from Black Sheep, and you have the ingredients for a hearty fall stew. Finish it off with a salad and some crusty bread from Full Circle Bakery, with Nancy’s pears for dessert.