Storm clouds farmers’ hopes for busiest day
As retail stores girded for Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the holiday season, vendors at the city’s farmers’ markets arrived with truckloads of fresh produce for what traditionally is their most hectic day of the year.
Call it Green Saturday, the last shopping weekend before Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately, heavy rains thinned the crowds at the Alemany open-air farmers’ market, which since 1947 has offered everything from arugula to zucchini.
“Selfishly, I’m a little glad it’s raining,” said Katherine Roberts, an Outer Mission resident, as she purchased pumpkins for pies.
May Jaber, the market’s manager, said that even though a crowd of a few hundred foodies had gathered around 5:30 a.m., the market would fall short of the expected 10,000 shoppers.
“Usually, you can’t set foot in the market on this Saturday,” she said. “Maybe if it clears up and the sun comes out, the people will come out too.”
At the Two Dog Farm stand, owners Mark and Nibby Bartle arrived with 800 pounds of squash from their Santa Cruz farm and weren’t sure if they’d sell it all.
Mark Bartle said that this year the hot item was kabocha, a winter squash that looks like a green pumpkin. Bartle said it was superb for soups and pies.
“A lot of different ethnic communities like it,” Bartle said. “And now a lot more people are starting to know about it — it’s the squash to have.”
Across the way, Rosa De’ Santis watched on as customers picked through her display of rare fruits, from chocolate persimmons to bowlingball-sized lemons.
But De’ Santis was morose. She has driven her edible cargo to the market from her Fresno farm every Saturday for more than 30 years, and she said she had expected the fresh-food craze that has bolstered the market’s crowds in recent years to help make Saturday a historic day.
“This could be the worst Saturday before Thanksgiving in 30 years,” she said. “But we’ll sell it all. We’ll go through it; we’ll make it happen.”
As shoppers at Alemany purchased the fixings for their feasts, a few miles away volunteers collected canned foods and frozen turkeys at the San Francisco Food Bank.
On Friday, Food Bank executives announced that they had collected fewer than half of the 3,300 turkeys needed for their annual giveaways. The bank distributes food to social service agencies such as St. Anthony’s, Walden House and St. Vincent de Paul.
By noon Saturday, the bank had collected about 200 more birds, workers said.
Brendan Kelly, a Marina district resident, arrived with a trunk full of turkeys.
Kelly said that after reading a story in The Chronicle about the shortfall, he and co-workers at Boingo Wireless agreed to pass along the 10 birds they received as holiday gifts from their company.
“Some people were going to be out of town and some people didn’t need them, so we decided to bring them here,” Kelly said. “It made sense.”
Bernal Heights residents Richard Butterfield and his wife, Glynn, stopped by a Safeway, then dropped off three turkeys at the bank.
“This time of year some people aren’t doing so well,” Richard Butterfield said. “It was time to double up the effort.”