Saturdays in Columbus, OH Are Ripe for the Picking

Every Saturday from nine am until noon you can find the Clintonville Farmers Market open for business along High Street Between Orchard Lane and Dunedin. Farmers and crafters line the street in pop-up tents ready to sell their goods to local residents. The featured products in early spring are seasonal vegetables like asparagus, lettuces, kale, mesclun, radishes, carrots, rhubarb, bok choy, and green onions. You can also purchase vegetable starts, baked goods, honey, eggs, and organically raised poultry and beef. You will also find sweet potato pies, organic cookies, handmade jewelery, beeswax candles, and other goodies.

For those of you not familiar with the concept of a Farmers Market it allows producers and growers sell directly to the public. The benefits of a farmers market are include everything from reduced prices for local shoppers, due in part to the fact that the middle man has been cut out, to paving the way to creating a sustainable community by providing access within the community to the foods and products of the locality.

Farmers Markets support the local economy by supporting local producers. When you purchase from a farmers market you are buying directly from the grower. You are helping to support their families, and in turn they are supplying you with a high quality produce that you just can't always find in the local supermarket. It goes back to the days of people helping people.

The Clintonville Farmers Market was founded back in 2003 by Clintonville residents who were anxious to obtain local produce with growers that they would get to know and develop a personal connection with. The fruits and vegetables are harvested just a few hours before they are sold. They have weekly cooking demonstrations complete with recipes for ingredients that are available from the growers that week. If basil is in season, chances are you can head on over to the volunteer tent and sample some homemade vegan pesto and grab the recipe so that you can make it at home.

Clintonville isn't the only local farmers market around Columbus. Just a few miles down the road in Worthington on High Street you will find the Worthington Farmers Market open form May until the end of October. Grove City also has a farmers market starting in July. We also can not forget the much loved North Market in the heart of Columbus off of Vine street.

Columbus is ripe with new and exciting things for your family to do, why not spend the day exploring local farmers markets? Go exploring, go to a farmers market near you.