A Beautiful Day for the Boulder Farmers Market

If you like your veggies fresh from the farm, but hate fighting your way through crowds to get them, today's the day to visit the Boulder Farmers Market (open until 2). The rain is pretty light, but so are the crowds. I was actually able to pull straight into a parking space in the 14th Street city lot, where it's usually necessary to stalk people leaving to get a space. There were some gaps where vendors chose not to show up, but all my favorite organic farms, diehards that they are, were there. The rain prevented taking detailed notes, but here are a few observations. We've had green garlic available for a couple of weeks, but this was the first week I saw garlic scapes, those fun, wildly curly scallion/garlic creatures. Snap peas also made their first appearance, so along with the collards, kale, and other substantial greens that are available, the organic veggie selections are now considerably beyond a bunch of baby spring greens. I also saw real heads of lettuce, in addition to the loose baby lettuce that is still available. With the very diminished crowds because of the weather, the sweetheart at Red Wagon Organic Farm gave me a beautiful bunch of radishes for free with my purchase of their garlic scapes. Finally, coming from a different parking lot for me since parking was so easy to find, I encountered Community Cycles doing valet bike parking for a donation (probably to file under the "only in Boulder" category). This is a terrific idea, since trying to lock up a bike at the market gets to be a big challenge on glorious summer Saturdays. Not an issue today, but something to keep in mind for the future.