Please continue to support locally produced foods by visiting other Oregon farmers markets. http://oregonfarmersmarkets.org/directory/directory.html

If you are interested in starting a farmers market in North Portland please contact North Portland Community Works to help get you pointed in the right direction! http://www.npnscommunity.org/

Cheers and good eating to you all!

“Small markets like ours are independent non-profits” reminds IFM Board Chair Marisa Bangs “and, for us, that means we do not break even with the stall fees we charge our vendors. Without another source of revenue – sponsorships and individual donations – our market is in jeopardy.”

The volunteers who have steered the market through the 2011 season have some tough choices ahead of them. If a major sponsor isn’t found soon, the market either shuts down permanently or may be handed-off to another operator, if there’s any interest.

“It’s not just a lack of revenue” notes Stefanie Snider, IFM Volunteer Coordinator, “we’re in need of volunteers too. Many hands make the market run smoothly and keep it fun; too few hands burn out the committed volunteers.”

IFM is currently searching for a Community Liaison to the Overlook Neighborhood. “An Overlook resident with a great neighborhood network would be very helpful as we begin deciding our future” says Marisa. “We need to hear from the local residents if they want this Farmers Market to remain operating on Wednesday nights at our Overlook site. We’ll also need their time and energy to make that happen.”

The IMF’s mission is to provide a venue where local farmers can sell their produce directly to people that enjoy meeting the folks who grow their food. Other food-related vendors have been selected to join the market in recent years as well. 2011 was IMF’s eighth season.

For more information about the market, visit www. INTERSTATEFARMERSMARKET.com or call 971-344-0115 . To volunteer, contact Stefanie at IFM.Volunteer@gmail.com 　

Market Open Thru Sept 28th Wednesdays 3 pm to 7 pm 3550 N Interstate Ave (next to Overlook Park) Free parking for Bicycles and Cars. On the Yellow Max Line.

August 12, 2011

The Interstate Farmers Market is sorry to announce the cancellation of the Saturday Market located at Lombard. We had high hopes for this venue when we decided to expand to this site, bringing more local food to North Portland and supporting more small farmers. The delay in the spring harvest due to the extremely wet weather affected many of our vendors and their ability to have product to sell at the new location. We were unable to recover from this setback and recruit enough additional vendors to get the market off to a solid start with good momentum and the cash reserves allocated for this location have now been exhausted.
After the close of September which marks the end of the 2011 market season, we will evaluate our situation and move forward with the benefit of the lessons learned from the past year. We thank you for your support in this effort and invite your continued patronage of the Wednesday Market at Overlook Park.

Sincerely,
The Interstate Farmers Market Community Board of Directors
www.interstatefarmersmarket.com
contact@interstatefarmersmarket.com

There’s lot of delicious produce this week at the market including TOMATOES, PEACHES, CORN, raspberries, cherries, basil, lemon cucumbers, slicing cucumbers, new potatoes (reds & Yukon golds), carrots, cabbage, beets, green beans, collard greens, zucchini, napa cabbage, onions, cilantro, basil, parsley, green onions, rainbow chard, sugar snap peas, spinach, and more! Our meat & egg vendor is here and there are certified Organic eggs at the Raymond Kuenzi Farm’s booth too.

Summertime is market time and market time is fun time! Come on out & enjoy the free live music, have a coffee, beer or a glass of wine, get a tamale or sausage, or even try the okonomiyaki, a popular Japanese street food. We also have some handmade items to help stock your fridge & pantry including locally made chips & salsa, jam from local berries, honey from farmer Ian’s bees, hummus & Mediterranean salads, handmade bread, bagels & pastries, fair-trade Organic coffee beans, ice cream, and gluten-free baked goods.

Thanks for doing your shopping here — that’s how you help keep local food available by keeping these growers and small business owners in business!

See you at the market!

Interstate Farmers Market Portland, OR
Wednesdays Overlook Park 3pm-7pm

This Saturday is our Community Bike Ride to the Market! Please come one and all and join the ride. We’re meeting at Columbia Park at 10am near the kids water park (near N. Winchell and N. Woolsey). We’ll take a safe & easy route so no one gets left behind. This is a fun way to dust off the wheels for the season, get to know your neighbors, and build some community on the way to the market; we hope you can make it! For more information call 971-344-0115

Oregon Farmers Markets Are Open…read all about it!

We hope you see you this Saturday for coffee, baked goods, plant starts, tamales and produce.  There will be a seed planting activity going on at the Kids Booth, and our Piedmont neighbor Jamie Stillway will be gracing the music stage. 

On Wednesday join us for even more produce than last week, and more vendors than ever.  There will be a canning demonstration, Kids Booth, more great music and as always the Community Booth will be there spreading the word about the great work local nonprofits are doing.

Please give us a call or email if you have any questions, and most importantly, come to the market!

No Farms, No Food!

This is the second week of our Wednesday market
at the Overlook Market 3pm-7pm
3550 N. Interstate Ave at Overlook Park

Njuzu Mbira will be performing in the music tent from 4:30-6:30, playing traditional zimbabwean music on the mbira, a many-steel-keyed instrument played in a large gourd so come check them out!

New fresh produce & meats & a whole lot more…

This week DeMaritini Family Farm rejoins the vendor mix now that some of their crops are in. They will have a variety of dark-leafy greens, rhubarb, parsley, cilantro, leeks & more. Winters Farm will return with spinach, asparagus, several kinds of potatoes, rhubarb, chard & homemade jams. ProFarm will have asparagus and pickled asparagus in both regular and spicy versions. Our new produce vendor, Good Natured Gardens will have plant starts again, including lots of varities of tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers and other for those of you who want to grow your own.

Don’t forget to stop in at SweetHome Farms for meats including tons of different cuts of beef, poultry, pork, goat, lamb as well as offals. They have sausages/cured meats and eggs too. You can pickup some recipies for steak tacos, and then grab some salsa to go with it: back at IFM by popular demand this season is Hot Mama Salsa with a variety of handmade traditional salsas sure to please palates from the most timid to the most adventurous. If you’re more into vegan tacos, or are just looking for dairy alternatives, you’ll definitely want to visit Heidi Ho Organics with nut-based vegan cheese. They even have montery jack among others!

If you’d rather have some worthy chefs do the cooking for you, you can grab a dinner of tamales from Hacienda, or go European at Fetzers German Sausage, or try the world-famous eggrolls at Thai Mama. And whether it’s for here or to take home, you won’t want to miss dessert: Scoop Handmade Ice Cream will serve you up a cone for instant gratification or a pint for the freezer, and of course is happy to do both! If you’re more into baked goods, Carte Scrupmtious has what you need: cookies and pastries galore…hey, that could go well with some ice cream (just saying)!

Entertaining this weekend? Or maybe get a special treat just because…

Herr’s Family Farm has their gorgeous bouquets of freshly-cut flowers to brighten the room and bring some needed color to the Oregon gray we’re having this week. For a unique gift for your host, or to try something new yourself, check out Sage and Sea Farm and sample their sipping vinegars. They’re a great addition to cocktails, or are a fun way to make non-alcoholic beverages special. Parents love that an ounce of sipping vinegar made from real fruit can flavor carbonated water to make a soda for kids with no corn syrup, artificial colors, or artificial anything!

Sliced bread, bagles, and pastries are all made with care & the highest quality ingredients at Gabriels Bakery, so don’t forget the bread! They have lots of whole grain varieties including quinoa bread & bagles, oat bread, 7-grain bread and cornmeal bread.

As long as the weather cooperates for the crops, new produce vendors will be ready to start next week including Raymond Kuenzi Farm with Oregon Tilth Certified Organic produce, Sip with smoothies made on the spot, Domo Domo with Okonomyaki, a Japanese street food, as well as Ambacht Brewing, Klickitat Canyon Winery and Randall Street Baking Co who are also all slated to start at the market next week.

Lots more fun!

If you’ve ever thought about learning Spanish, or helping others to do so, this week’s Community Booth will be right up your alley. Educate Ya will be tabling with lots of great information for you to check out, including info about their translating services to help your business or organization achieve a broader reach — IFM used their translating services for our Spanish language fliers…you can do it too!

The Kids Tent is stocked and ready for the young ones and as always the Info Booth will have free recipes, tokens for sale with your debit
or SNAP/EBT card, and Market Basket order forms so you can get signed up for your farmers market CSA.

Volunteering at the market as well as other times…

We’d love to have your help any time you’re free to give it. We need help at the market itself, but we also need help with office work and outreach that happen on other days of the week, and are flexible to your schedule. Send us a quick email and let us know you’re interested. Thanks!

Now markets every Saturday too!

Our Opening Day Celebration of our brand new Lombard location was a huge success last Saturday, thank you to all those who came out to support our new market! Please join us this and every Saturday throughout the season, in the De La Salle High School parking lot, at Interstate Ave and Lombard St. The market is open 9am-1:30pm. We have some of the same vendors, but mainly it’s a different mix, so stop on over and see what’s new in Kenton!

Thanks for all your support, and we’ll see you at the market!

Lisa Bersani
Market Manger

And thanks to all of you who came out for the Opening Day Celebration of the Overlook market onWednesday…what a great time!!  The weather was perfect, The Shook Twins were amazing as always, and the smoothies blended up by our Guest Chefs from The Green Lady Cafe were uniquely delicious.  If you didn’t get a chance to stop in to see the Transportation Options folks at the Community Booth, you have another chance to get free bike maps, walking routes and fresh ideas at the Saturday market on June 11th.

The weather has been rough on our farmers this Spring, so please come out and support them in these early days of the season. Many of them have less produce than they would like, but they will still be there for you, and at the info booth we will have lots of recipes for using early season items like arugula, lettuce, radishes, leeks, parsley, cilantro, mustard greens, lettuce, potatoes, spinach, rhubarb & more. And of course we’ll have our wonderful ready-to-eat vendors like Thai Mama and Hacienda, as well as Scoop with cones or handpacked pints of their homemade ice cream! Be sure to check out one of our new vendors, Heidi Ho Organics who will be bringing vegan cheese!

We’d love to have your volunteer help on either of these days, or throughout the season, so please contact Stefanie Snider our awesome Volunteer Coordinator to get signed up for a volunteer shift: IFM.volunteer@gmail.com

We’re still seeking guest chefs to come demonstrate cooking & preserving with market produce, meat & eggs. Contact Market Manager Lisa Bersani for more info: contact@interstatefarmersmarket.com

Thanks for your support, and we’ll see you at the market!
–Lisa

Lisa Bersani
Market Manager

Our Wednesday location doesn’t have the capacity to support a Saturday market, so we’ve identified a potential second site, the De La Salle High School parking lot, and earned their support and enthusiasm as hosts. 

We’ve made a plan to preserve the livability of the neighborhood, and be great neighbors.  Vendors’ trucks will be parked out of the way so as not to take resident parking, damage tree branches or create an eyesore.  Traffic flow on market day will be in one direction only on Russet between Fenwick and Interstate to decrease congestion.  Customer parking will be available in the De La Salle parking lot, and the market will launch a no-car campaign to encourage and incentivize customers to walk, bike and take TriMet to the market.  Have other ideas?  Let us know!

We’re waiting to hear back from the City of Portland who needs to approve our request to hold the market at this residential zoned site.  Thank you to all those of you who have already written in with your support for this process!  We are asking for only 19 market days over the year, and promise to address your concerns and suggestions for how this can be a positive change for our customers, farmers, volunteers and neighbors.  (This is the same process that the Portland Farmers Market company had great success with for the King market in the Alberta neighborhood.) 

3 ways to give your support:

·         Email contact@interstatefarmersmarket.com and give us your feedback and ideas about the Lombard location.

·         Call Market Manager Lisa Bersani at 971-344-0115 and let us know what you think.

·         Spread the word!  Talk about it with your neighbors, at your kids’ school, at your place of worship, at the gym… let folks know you’d like to see a successful, independently-run farmers market in the neighborhood!

 And of course, we always need volunteers, so get in touch and let us know if you’re willing to lend a hand with any of the wide variety of tasks we’re working on!

If you want a closer, more accessible venue to shop locally, for the highest quality fresh and healthy foods, please give us your support.

If you want your dollars to stay in the community and support our economy, please give us your support.

If you’re a business owner in the area who would like to benefit from the market day phenomenon (surrounding businesses typically see a great increase in sales on days farmers markets operate), please give us your support.    

Our community is our best asset and we thank you for that! 

                                                                                         Sincerely,     

Interstate Farmers Market Community Board of Directors and Market Manager Lisa Bersani

1.       Secretary/Treasurer – Takes minutes at our monthly board meetings and keeps track of our funds.  If you have strong communication skills, enjoy keeping track of the details, and can balance a checkbook, we’d love to have your help! 

2.       Volunteer Coordinator –Help us develop our volunteer program to build community and keep the market running smoothly all year long.   — FILLED!
 
3.       Community Liaison/Development – Connects with the community at large to create and build our best resources: community partnerships, and public support and buy-in. 
 
4.       At Large (2) – These are positions of general support, with a variable commitment depending on the projects we’re working on and their timelines. 
 
Help us continue to grow as North Portland’s independent, community-run farmers market!

For more detialed descriptions on any of these positions, visit our Volunteer page.