Going On 22 Years––

If This Is Saturday, It Must Be The Bethel Farmers’ Market

By Dottie Evans

From all that we hear, residents of the greater Danbury area can visit a local farmers’ market at least three times a week and never go to the same place.

If this is Tuesday, it must be the Sandy Hook Organic Farmers’ Market, behind St John’s Church on Washington Avenue, Route 34, from 9 am to 1 pm.

If this is Thursday, it must be the Danbury City Center Farmers’ Market at the Danbury Green between Delay and Ives Streets, between 3 and 6:30 pm.

If this is Saturday, it must be the Bethel Farmers’ Market, which might be the biggest and the longest-running of them all, located at 67 Stony Hill Road and open from 9 am to 1 pm.

For 22 years now, a group of farmers from several area Connecticut towns have committed to coming each Saturday morning to the Bethel Farmers’ Market on the wide field behind the Agricultural Extension building off Route 6. They come because they know a loyal following of appreciative customers who know that nothing tastes as good as homegrown, can be counted on to show up and buy.

While the farmer/vendors set up their stalls and put out the fresh-picked vegetables, berries, and flowers, or their own home-produced meats, pastries, and breads, the regular customers are already sizing up the tomatoes, peering at the fresh corn, and sniffing the scones and muffins.

“It’s been a very good year at the Bethel Farmers’ Market despite the fact that, week to week, we never know exactly what’s going to be ready for picking,” said Newtown resident Linda Hufner of Cedar Hill Farm off Brushy Hill Road.

Ms Hufner has served as Market Master for the Bethel Farmers’ Market for many years, and she and her husband Frank offer whatever they are growing at Cedar Hill Farm, from cabbages to kale, depending upon the season.

The heavy spring rains have made harvesting a bit tricky this year, Ms Hufner said, but now the beans and tomatoes are ripening so fast they would be opening their farm up on the following Sunday for the public to come “pick-your-own.”

“We don’t know if anyone will show up, but we’ll put the sign out.”

The Bethel Farmers’ Market, open from mid-July through October, is well-known for specialty items as well as the staples. The great diversity of farm products available each Saturday includes cheese, fresh eggs, maple syrup, honey, baked goods, cut flowers, bedding plants and perennials, beef, pork, and seafood. There is even a full range of dyed yarn from Maple Bank Farm, where the resident flock of sheep is sheared each spring to provide the wool.

For the second year in a row, the market features USDA Prime beef, flash-frozen and shrink wrapped, sold from ice-cold coolers by the New England Beef/Fair Haven Farm, located in New Milford.

To see the hoards of people leaving the market, loaded down with bulging bags of Connecticut grown items, one would never know this had been a wet, late, and unpredictable growing year.

It seems that the 2003 Bethel Farmers’ Market is going to bring home a bountiful harvest.