Most days, Riverside’s Centennial Park is empty and free for pedestrians to enjoy. But on Wednesdays from 2:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in June through October, vendors from near and far set up their booths at the farmers market, where residents can find fresh produce and meat alongside delicious snacks and other goods.
Nearly every item up for sale at the market has been crafted or prepared by the vendors selling them. That’s intentional, said Amy Jacksic, the market’s volunteer manager who helped found it in 2009 before the village got involved in 2016.
“There are other communities that allow multi-level marketing vendors and lots of crafts and stuff, but we really wanted to make our market a producer-only market,” she told the Landmark. “If you sell something there, you’ve actually made it or grown it.”
This year, the market accepted seven new vendors, Jacksic said, for a total of 27 groups expected to set up shop at least once this season.
“We get a lot of applications, but we turn many of them down because they don’t meet that producer-only criteria,” she said. “We had somebody trying to sell California grapes, so it’s not locally grown. We would never, in a million years, allow something like that. People right now are wondering why we don’t have tomatoes; well, they’re not locally grown yet, so we’ll have those in the end of June [or] July.”
While the vendors must qualify as “local,” Jacksic said the market’s scope includes nearby states. That means vendors like Finn’s Ranch and Bailey’s Farm to Home, both based in Michigan, are fair game.
“This was the first farmers market we did when we started the farm” about nine years ago, said Alex Finn, one of the owners of Finn’s Ranch in Buchanan, Mich. “The community here in Riverside has been very supportive throughout the years. It’s been a very loyal community.”
Kylee Bailey of Bailey’s Farm to Home agreed the community is what’s been bringing her family’s farm back to Riverside for about seven years.
“It’s really everyone that we see every year. We kind of build a bond with everyone,” she said.
Her father, Mike Bailey, said his favorite part of the farmers market is speaking with the customers and keeping up with them year after year. Jacksic said the Baileys have given back to the community in recent years, donating leftover produce to the Riverside Presbyterian Church’s food pantry at the end of the day.
Many of the vendors who spoke to the Landmark at the June 18 market named Jacksic as a driving force behind it and its success.
“Amy is somebody that I really respect. Her patience, her ability to bring people together, I really admire,” said Sam Zeitlin of Zeitlin’s Delicatessen, which has sold bagels at the farmers market since last year. “I wanted to scale my business with the farmers markets, and I’d never been to Riverside. I’m originally from the east coast, and I feel at home in Riverside … We offer a premium product that is a Chicago product, but Riverside deserves the love, too.”
Jacksic said the farmers market has “plateaued intentionally” due to reaching maximum capacity at Centennial Park. While the market could grow in the number of vendors if it moved, she said its central, walkable location is more worthwhile.
The timing, too, is on purpose to ensure as many vendors as possible can fit the market into their busy schedules, especially those traveling from far away, she said.
“We’re purposefully a Wednesday market because we know we can never be a Saturday market with only 9,000 residents. On Saturdays, farmers want to go downtown,” she said. “There are very few Wednesday markets, so this is a good filler day for almost all our vendors.”
Jacksic, like most vendors, said her favorite thing about the farmers market is how it brings the community together. She said Riverside’s involvement for the past nine years has been invaluable.
“We couldn’t do it without them,” she said. “They fully believe in the philosophy of, ‘Let’s provide a producer-only market to the community, and if you build it, they’ll come.’”