🔒The ripe stuff: Outdoor Portland Farmers’ Market comes out of hibernation

Shivering in a knitted cap behind jars of golden honey, Laurel Wishman is all about the bees she tends on Maine’s midcoast. “With beekeeping, it’s kind of cross your fingers and hope,” says Wishman, an apprentice beekeeper at Barters Island Bees in Boothbay and first-time vendor at the Portland Farmers’ Market in Deering Oaks Park. “This Friday, hopefully if the weather pulls through, we’ll be installing our hives,” she says on this Wednesday morning in late April. “Unfortunately, a lot of them got wiped out this last winter.”

Jars are priced at $15, from the best-selling raw honey to the Maine Mousse line of creamy spreads flavored with organic fruits and spices from cinnamon to blueberry lemon. “We call it butter because of the texture, but there’s no added dairy,” Wishman says as this journalist tries a sample that tickles the tongue with subtle sweetness. As the number of farms continues to decline in Maine, direct-to-consumer sales remain a lifeline. In 2022, around 20% of Maine agricultural products or $172.6 million worth of goods were sold directly by farms, according to the latest agriculture census. Farmers sell through stands and markets like this one in Portland, held twice a week from April through November. Carrying on a tradition that goes back to colonial times, the Portland Farmers’ Market — originally in the lower part of the Town Hall — provides personal connections that some customers prize even more in this age of internet shopping and corporate-owned chains. Through a program called Harvest Bucks, many markets offer additional incentives to residents on federal food assistance, helping shoppers access fresh produce while supporting growers. Less crowded during the week, the market is off to a quiet start on its first Wednesday with just a handful of vendors shortly after 7 a.m. as Portland resident Sara Schwartz and her husband stroll by with lettuce they just purchased. “We love the Amish vendor,” says Schwartz, a market regular even though she finds it pricier than the grocery store. “It’s higher, but it’s worth it because actually these lettuces are amazing.” While Schwartz prefers to do her own baking, the fragrant bagels on offer from Maggie’s Farm at Mulberry Creek in Bowdoinham are a hit with other shoppers, including one filling up two bags. The farm is run by Glenn and Maggie Shourds, a father-and-daughter team who moved to Maine from southern Indiana eight years ago to start a dairy farm.

Today on 10 acres they own and another 12 rented acres, they raise dairy goats and cows as well as livestock and vegetables. They started baking sourdough bread during the pandemic and made 500 bagels to bring to the market today, though Glenn is unsure how much longer his arthritis will let him keep kneading. Starting their fifth year at the Portland Farmers’ Market, they also sell in Lewiston and closer to home in Bowdoinham. In Portland only on Wednesdays for now, they’ll also come on Saturdays in the summer, when they expect to sell well over 1,000 bagels a week. Asked about the price of ingredients, Maggie says she feels lucky that those haven’t gone up. “Part of it is, as we increase [production], we get volume discounts also,” her dad chimes in as Maggie waxes sentimental about the baby goats born this spring. “At the moment, the kids are getting all the milk and we haven’t started weaning them off yet,” the 23-year-old says. “They’re going to be very unhappy once we start doing that.” About 100 miles from her Pittsfield farm, Heather Donahue of Balfour Farm says she recently raised yogurt prices by a dollar because of higher packaging costs. Eggs, on the other hand, are priced at $7 compared to $8 during last year’s nationwide surge to record highs. “It doesn’t make sense for us to sell them under what people are paying the grocery store, so we just match that and keep an eye on it and see what other people are selling at market,” she explains. At the same time, “we don’t want to go below our cost of production and margin and all that fun business-y stuff.”

But $7 is a “sweet spot” for Balfour Farm, a six-person operation she and her husband founded in 2010 after moving here from upstate New York. Though they used to take part in up to nine farmers’ markets a week, they now just come to Portland. Much newer to farming, Morgan Lucier is a former hotel conference manager who switched careers after having children as a way to earn an income from home. She and her husband, a mechanical engineer, operate Merribrook Farm in New Gloucester, growing microgreens and herbs in their basement greenhouse. “It’s a good way to add extra nutrition to your diet,” whether adding to smoothies or baking them into muffins like she does for her children. But the family only eats what they don’t sell, which is not always the case when business is booming. “If there isn’t any left over, we don’t get them,” Lucier says.