At harvest time, downtown market delivers high tide of produce

featuring the Market’s own Shirley Hill Farm and Lala’s Pastries

Add this to the list of things you can now get downtown: European burpless cucumbers, $1 each. But there’s a catch-you can only find them on Thursdays, when the weekly farmer’s market flows along Concord Street for an entire block, between Chestnut and Pine.

Actually, I’m not sure what the point of a burpless cucumber is. As a cucumber-eating veteran, I’ve come to expect the little organic belch you always get about an hour after consuming one, either in slices or whole. Somehow it always tastes like cucumber, even if you’ve been eating a banana split in the interim. Go figure.

So, as I stare at the basket of burpless cucumbers offered by Stone Wall Organic Farm in Nottingham, I decide to pass. To eat a cucumber without the prospect of at least a little burp would be like drinking flat Coke. Beside, regular “burpful” cucumbers in the next basket are a quarter cheaper.

Burpless cukes aside, everything else on sale at the downtown farmer’s market looks, well, good enough to eat. But I’m not here to buy or to eat just yet. I’m on a mission-to find the tomato lady from Goffstown before she runs out of today’s supply of precious pedigreed “heirloom” tomatoes.

Great time to go

If you haven’t yet checked out the farmer’s market, this is a great time to go. Harvest season brings a flood of fresh produce from local growers. The market, organized by Intown Manchester and now an annual tradition, runs every Thursday from 3 to 6:30 p.m. through Oct. 17.

Right now it’s high tide for fruits and vegetables. Last week found the street crowded with stalls and tents, all with baskets and bins filled to overflowing, including an entire tow-trailer filled with freshly picked corn from Heron Farm Pond in South Hampton (40 cents an ear, $2.25 a half-dozen, $4.50 a dozen). Right next to it was a table covered with luscious New Hampshire-grown peaches from Mulberry Grand Farm. The price? $4.50 a quart. (Any kind of fruit packed and priced by the quart is always good.)

In addition to burpless and burpful cukes, Stone Wall Farm offered baskets of Swiss chard, organic kale, and collard greens at $2 a pound, while a pound of organic rhubarb could be had for $1.50.

But vegetables are just the beginning. (Yes, I know some people think they’re the end.) While searching for the tomato lady, I was tempted by everything from soap and flowers and bread to wine and maple syrup and venison steaks.

The perils of pastry

The venison was from Bonnie Brae Farms in Plymouth, where staffers making their first appearance were facing their own temptations-right next to their booth was a table groaning with authentic Hungarian pastries made by local baker Ladislau Lala.

And if you’re not there to shop, it’s worth checking out for the carnival atmosphere. Even on an overcast afternoon, a sunny spirit pervades the stalls, with people marveling over the wares, dumping beans in scales-doing marketplace things.

Lively Peruvian pan-flute music was provided by Inca Son, a three-man Andean music folk ensemble. Turkeys and chickens sat unimpressed in cages, attracting kids and the occasional lunging black Labrador. The people-watching is superb: families with excited children, smartly dressed downtown business types, elderly folks with cloth bags who seem to have wandered in from the old country, a guy with a notebook scribbling down prices as he looks for the tomato lady.

At last I spot her under a tent at the Chestnut Street end of market. Her name is Sara Shirley. Not long ago she worked as an attorney for a prominent area law firm, but she gave it all up for tomatoes. Well, not just tomatoes, but many other crops as well, all of which she raises on her hilltop organic farm in Goffstown.

But tomatoes were what filled most of her baskets-tomatoes that weren’t the kind you’d find in a supermarket. These were “heirloom” tomatoes, purebred varieties, thoroughbred super-tomatoes with colorful names like Green Zebra and Cherokee Purple whose ancestry can be traced back for generations. Since her harvest started earlier this month, she’s been bringing about 50 pounds of tomatoes to the market each week, and she usually sells out in less than an hour.

From donuts to tomatoes

I first ran into the tomato lady at the farmer’s market out in Bedford at which I stopped earlier in the week to buy doughnuts. (Yes, there’s a guy who sells doughnuts, but they’re not grown on a farm. They’re made in East Manchester.) Before I got that far, however, I noticed something strange. The growers set up their tents in a row, and under the tent from Shirley Hill Farm in Goffstown was a woman surrounded by rows of baskets that were completely empty.

At first I wondered if she was selling a new kind of invisible produce (hey, I’d buy me some of that), but it turned out she had simply sold nearly everything she brought. Several small tubs of garlic bulbs and exactly three green peppers remained, but everything else was gone, gone, gone. I got talking with her, and it reminded me that one of the interesting things about a farmer’s market is not only the things you can buy, but the people you meet.

I thought tomatoes were quite a contrast to her legal days, but “that wasn’t doing it for me,” Sara told me. “It was not the kind of life I wanted.”

The kind of life she wanted involved wresting organically grown produce from an acre of land in Goffstown. As you might guess from the name, it’s on Shirley Hill Road, up on the part that offers spectacular views of downtown Manchester to the east. Sara married into the Shirley family, which has been in the area for 235 years, she said.

Grandma’s tomatoes

Even a vegetable dunce like me knows that supermarkets sell “hothouse” tomatoes, meaning they were engineered in a greenhouse somewhere using mass production techniques. It’s the way to create a profitable tomato that can withstand the modern shipping network. But the result isn’t anything like what came out of Grandma’s backyard garden in those August summers of long ago.

Grandma’s garden, however, never produced tomatoes with names like Green Zebra or others that Sara Shirley grows. Written on little cards in the empty baskets were names of a dozen varieties: Druzba, Goldie, Box Car Willie, and more.

Each card carried details. Druzba tomatoes are from Bulgaria and offer “a high acid content and a robust tomato flavor.” Goldies are “deep yellow-orange with red streaking; the favorite in many tomato trials.” Box Car Willies are one-and-a-half pound monsters, “red with dark orange undertones; extremely juicy with old fashioned flavor.”

I knew about things like grapes and wine, but I never realized tomatoes could be appreciated in the same fashion.

“It’s all about the flavor. It’s about taste as well,” Sara Shirley said. “And it’s a very delicate thing. You wouldn’t know that if your only experience is a supermarket tomato.”

Well, all my life I’d been consuming the tomato equivalent of jug wines, only now to discover what a true connoisseur can enjoy-carefully cultivated varieties that produce a characteristic mix of skins and seeds and that reach their peak for only a very short time.

Unlike wines in bottles, each heirloom tomato has its own characteristic appearance. Some are odd-looking. Others are downright weird.

“Some of them have very funny shapes,” the tomato lady said. “Some of them look really ugly, but it’s the flavor that counts.”
They sell for $2.25 a pound for all varieties, mix and match.
Making my selections

All this talk made me want to try one, but alas, the baskets were empty. So instead, I went home and visited www.tomatofest.com, where I found varieties with names that rival the paint hues at a hardware store: Isis Candy Cherry, Brandywine, Aunt Ginny’s Purple, Black Prince, Amish Gold, Amana Orange, Caspian Pink, and Earl of Edgecombe (OK, that last one doesn’t sound like a paint sample.)

This further whetted my interest, which was why I sought out the tomato lady’s next appearance at the Manchester farmer’s market. She also sells produce on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at her farm up on Shirley Hill Road.

This time the baskets weren’t empty. I made my selections: three Green Zebras, two Cosmonaut Volkovs, and one Boxcar Willie. The Zebras were small and compact, like limes; the Volkovs were more normal looking, and the Willie was big, bodacious, and multi-colored.

All were firm and ripe and soft to the touch. Sara weighed them on the scale, and I handed over my $4.25.

Later that day my wife and I tried them. I’m not going to tell you what it was like, because if I do then more people will want them and there will be less for us. So stop right now and forget you ever read this article. Nothing more to see here, folks-move along to the movie reviews or News of the Weird.

But if you do visit the farmer’s market, I hear they have these amazing burpless cucumbers.

The downtown farmer’s market is held every Thursday from 3 to 6:30 p.m. on Concord Street between Chestnut and Pine, rain or shine, through October. Free admission. For more information, call Intown Manchester at 645-6285.

This story ran in the Hippo Press 9/5/2002.
© Copyright 2002 The Hippo Press