Harvest market coming to Broadway

Shopping for favorite foods of fall will be available, at least temporarily, in downtown Lorain this month.

The Pirate Gardens Harvest Market will be 5 to 8 p.m., Oct. 26, in the first-floor space at 668 Broadway. An after-party with a jazz quartet from Oberlin will follow from 8 to 11 p.m. upstairs at the BRIAR, the Black River Innovative Artist Residence.

“It seems like an opportune time to take advantage of the harvest,” said Luke Theall, property manager for Lorain developer Gary Davis, who is donating space for the inaugural event.

The one-day market also is a prelude to a

biweekly farmers market planned for spring, summer and fall 2017, Theall said.

This month’s event has been in planning for at least six weeks. Theall said one grower argued that was not enough time to assemble the needed participants, but a farmers market will never happen in Lorain if people just dismiss the idea.

“I said, I still feel like Lorain needs something like this,” he said.

Theall added he tries, with varying success, to be a healthy eater.

“We wanted to just try and promote healthy eating and health living in Lorain,” he said.

Theall said he modeled the event after markets in Oberlin and the Tremont area of Cleveland.

The Lorain event has been advertised on Facebook and through flyers at the Rockin’ on the River weekly concert series at Black River Landing.

Scheduled vendors include Tyler’s Farm and the George Jones Farm of Oberlin; Gray House Pies of Westlake; and Woolf Farms of East Rochester. There also will be vendors selling products such as molasses, maple syrup and honey, Theall said.

For the first event, space for vendors is free, Theall said. Anyone interested in bringing produce to the Pirate Garden Harvest Market should call 330-5596278.

The Lorain market will be on a weeknight by design, Theall said.

“Basically we had a lot of vendors either tell us they were booked on the weekend or by the weekend they would have run out of product,”

he said. “So a lot of them suggested we have it on a weekday.”

It appeared Lorain has not had a steady farmers market in several years.

The Black River Landing Farmers’ Market operated for several years at the Transportation Center of the Lorain Port Authority, but its Facebook page noted that market dissolved in 2011.

The idea is a good one and the Lorain offering had some success, said Rick Novak, executive director of the Lorain Port Authority.

But the Saturday morning market in Lorain could not compete with weekend markets at Crocker Park shopping center in Westlake and at Kamm’s Corners in Cleveland, where growers and vendors made more money, Novak said.

“That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be tried again,” he said. Novak added, personally,

he enjoys shopping for produce at farmers markets and roadside stands in Lorain County and elsewhere.

“Trust me, I go to every farmers market I can,” he said.

Along with a number of Lorain County farms that sell produce direct to consumers, there are seasonal farmers markets in Amherst, Avon Lake, Elyria, Oberlin, Vermilion and Wellington.