In This Issue
Cooking Demo by Lissa Kane
My Mom's Gift
Featured Vendor: Think Unique Gardens
Community Booths
This Week at
the Market

The Bending Spoons

Cooking Demo with Lissa Kane

Oregon College of Oriental Medicine

Blue Sky Renewable Energy Project

Crista the Face Painter

Tip of the Week
Good Fertilizer Mix

For tomatoes, eggplants, peppers (solinaceae) ,
squash & cucumbers (curcubits)

4 parts fish meal
1 part kelp meal
� part bone meal
1 part dolomite lime

Use � c for the solinaceae and 1 c for the curcubits.
Mix it in at the bottom of the planting hole, put about an inch of dirt
above it, then put your plant in and firm the soil around it (and don't forget to water it well). That gives the plant a chance to settle in and start growing before its roots encounter the fertilizer, at which point it should take off!

(This recipe comes from Steve Solomon, the founder of Territorial seeds.)

Anne Berblinger,
Gales Meadow Farm
Featured Produce
Part of the beauty of farmers' markets is that our produce changes with the seasons. Stay current with weekly produce highlights here!

strawberries

Seascape Strawberries
(Happy Harvest Farm)

Purple Majesty Potatoes
(Winter Green Farm)

Black Morels
(Peak Forest Fruit)

Green and Yellow Bar Zucchini
 (Sweet Leaf Farm)

Snow Pea Shoots
(Blooming Goodies)
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The Local Dirt
Don't miss this week's cooking demonstration with Lissa Kane from Lucca Restaurant!

It's also Mother's Day weekend so it's a perfect time to buy your mom some fresh flowers, some starts for her garden, or some fresh jam. Or bring your mom to the market for coffee, pastries, and the fabulous music of The Bending Spoons.

For all you folks with small children, Crista the Face Painter will be at the market this week so bring your kids for the fun!

See you at the market!

Cooking Demo by Lissa Kane

Join us on the second Saturday of each month all season long to meet local chefs, learn new recipes and sample delicious food! Cooking demonstrations will take place at 9:45am and 10:30am at the musician's tent in the heart of the Hollywood Farmers' Market.

Although Lissa Kane hates to wash lettuce, she's always loved cooking, tweaking dishes, and eating fresh veggies from her parents' garden. She still has strong memories of fresh picked tomatoes from when she was young.

Lissa spent a semester in Lyon, France eating well, and learning some French. To get through school, she worked in restaurants  as a bartender/server and found that she really loved the business.  At one point she worked at a bar with 600+ beers, and through beer class she learned about and developed her palate.

She thrives on seeing people smiling with satisfaction over what they eat and drink.  After culinary school in DC (L'Academie de Cuisine) she traveled in SE Asia for a year, but her heart and taste buds landed in Italy. She cooked some, ate a lot, and returned to San Francisco where she was exposed to amazing local foods and solid classic techniques. She worked at LuLu and Piatti in the Bay area.  

She also discovered Farmers' Markets - their variety, and the beauty of buying locally.  The food tastes better, it's more nutritious, and money stays in the community. Transportation costs are far less.  Lissa moved to Portland a year and a half ago to open Lucca. She feels lucky to live an area with such bounty of delicious foods! Having been to Italy, Spain and France several times in the past ten years, she's come to love the complexity of simple, rustic, seasonal food. "If it grows together, it goes together. Mother Nature know best!"

Cooking demonstrations take place at 10:00 and 11:00am at the musician's tent on Hancock Street on the second Saturday of each month. Look for the recipe in next week's edition of The Local Dirt.
mom and babyMy Mom's Gift
by Jody Anderson,

HFM Community Volunteer Coordinator

I still remember the summer my mother first gave me a small plot in her vegetable garden. I couldn't tell you all the different things I grew, but I know that the cherry tomatoes I ate that summer tasted sweeter than any others I had ever had. I remember even more vividly the lemon cucumbers; I had never had a lemon cucumber before then. I adored picking them right off the vine, rubbing off the prickly part of the skin and biting into them. The fresh, cool, slightly sour taste is fresh in my memory. Lemon cucumbers are still one of my favorite vegetables!

My mom was raised on a farm near Boise, Idaho. She was pretty thrilled to have moved on to urban life, but she still managed to gift me with an appreciation of farming. I don't think there was a farmers' market near us in Boise, but there were plenty of U-Pick farms. We spent many a day picking plums, apricots, and cherries, canning jam, pickling cucumbers, green tomatoes, and watermelon rinds, and making fresh fruit leather. It was magical to turn the produce into food that we could use over time.

There was a reverence for food in my family, and I grew up with the understanding that the big, corporate farmer who now owns most of my mom's hometown was damaging our relationship to food. I learned early on what grew when, and that local food was good food. I learned that nourishment comes from more than just the food, that it also comes from growing the food, picking it, or talking to the farmer who grew it. And it comes from spending time in the kitchen with loved ones preparing it.

I never got to tell my mother how much I appreciated what she taught me about food, but I think she'd be pretty pleased with the Hollywood Farmers' Market, and with the blueberry jam our family made last summer.  She would have enjoyed the way we celebrate farming at the Hollywood Farmers' Market - gathering with our community, listening to music, shooting the breeze, and of course, eating.

think unique booth
Featured Vendor:
Think Unique Gardens
by Carla Kay Drain, HFM Volunteer

Suzanne Brillat of Think Unique Gardens has been passionate about growing since she planted her first herb garden as a child. She has been one of the most popular and knowledgeable vendors at the Hollywood Farmers' Market for many years because she generously gives advice to anyone who asks. She also has an amazing selection of lush, healthy plants!

Suzanne owns approximately 21 acres of mostly old-growth forest in Estacada, Oregon. She grows 70 varieties of tomato plants and a large assortment of vegetable starts, herbs, annuals & perennials. She also
has an affinity for unique, non-edible plants. The "Black Rose" Aeonium is one of the most unusual, a succulent whose leaves grow darker as they are exposed to more sunlight.

Everything Suzanne grows is fertilized naturally, without chemicals. She uses manure from her chickens, turkeys, rabbit, geese and ducks and also adds kelp. "It's the whole farm thing that makes it all work, I think! Kelp brings it back to where we all started. I even use
eggshells to supplement for calcium. Investing more into my chickens this year was the right thing to do for my customers (and their response) makes it all worth it"! She also sells her eggs at HFM but they sell out fast, so come early!

Suzanne's plants also get a healthy dose of music and OPB everyday. She can tell how well her plants are doing by how they respond to her dancing in the aisles of the greenhouse when she plays music. "My peppers like the dancing the most!"

It's a rewarding business but also very hard work. Suzanne starts packing for the Saturday market on Friday. "I look around for the plant that has that 'I want to go home with someone' look. I try to see each plant as a living connection to all. I guess you could call
it respect." On Saturday morning she packs eggs while drinking coffee, then does a quick inventory before heading out the door at 5 A.M.

Suzanne started her business after working 15 years for Intel. She'd been unable to have a child after 8 years of marriage so she decided to research various herbs that were thought to improve fertility. Nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy and says she still grows and sells every herb that helped her. Suzanne's 14 year-old son grew up at the farmers' markets and he now
assists her with the business, as do a few of her friends.

Think Unique Gardens can also be found at the Vancouver Farmers Market (Sunday) and soon at the Interstate Farmers Market (Wednesday) and Lloyd Farmers' Market (Tuesday).

Suzanne had some final words about her philosophy. "I always remind my customers that what you give to your plants, you receive - and recycling everything, even my knowledge, is a part of the whole...like all pots*, bags, etc. Growing organically is challenging but I really have a hard time giving up on a plant so I'll give it several years, and almost always I'll find a way to make it flourish".

With that kind of attitude and patience, it's no surprise that Suzanne is a successful mother, grower and businesswoman!

(* A Reminder...bring used pots to Suzanne's booth, she'll happily reuse & recycle them!)
Community Booths
Learn more about the organizations tabling at the market each week in our community booth column.

Andeo International Homestays
Andeo International Homestays (formerly International Summerstays) was founded by our director Melinda Samis in 1981 as a nonprofit organization specializing in short-term summer programs. Over the years our homestay programs have grown to include year-round homestays for college students in the Pacific Northwest, as well as year-round homestay study and immersion programs abroad for high school and college-age students and adults. What has also grown since 1981 is our international network of families, students, teachers, independent travelers and homestay specialists who are dedicated to exploring cross-cultural friendship and understanding. In 2008 we welcomed over 1,000 students to homestays in the Northwest, and sent over 350 students abroad on homestay programs in nine countries!

Oregon College of Oriental Medicine (OCOM) is a nonprofit educational institution dedicated to advancing health care and the art of healing. Founded in 1983 in Portland, Oregon, OCOM was one of the first Oriental medicine colleges in the United States to provide master's-level instruction. In 2005, OCOM became the first college in the nation to graduate doctors of acupuncture and Oriental medicine.

OCOM recently opened a new clinic location in the Hollywood Square Building, adjacent to the Hollywood Farmers' Market. The OCOM Hollywood Square Clinic is comprised of four individual treatment rooms, one conference room and a waiting area. The opening of this new location follows OCOM's commitment to serving the community and providing exemplary and affordable patient care in the Portland metro area. The clinic currently offers appointments on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings.

OCOM will be at the Hollywood Farmers' Market this Saturday performing demonstration acupuncture treatments. The public is welcome to participate so please stop by!
The Hollywood Farmers' Market is open Saturdays, May through October from 8am - 1pm and November 7, 14, and 21 from 9am - 1pm. We are located on NE Hancock Street between 44th and 45th Avenues (one block South of Sandy Blvd).

For more information, check us out online at
www.hollywoodfarmersmarket.org.

See you Saturday!


Hollywood Farmers' Market