Back to the Norwich Farmers’ Market

Lebanon and Hanover soon to follow

The Norwich Farmers Market will open this weekend on Saturday, May 1, from 9 am to 1 pm. Get there early and hope for croissants.

From Abracadabra Coffee to Z Botanicals, there are many dozens of vendors, including at least 19 new ones, who are readying their wares and hoping for decent weather on Saturday.

From the NFM website:

For 40 years the Norwich Farmers' Market has offered the very finest in homegrown and homemade products in the Upper Valley. Our vendors sell only items grown, raised, created, or prepared by their Upper Valley-based business. Every Saturday from May through October, and twice a month November through April, vendors offer a rich cornucopia of fresh farm produce, delicious baked goods, and exquisite handcrafted items.

But unless you are looking at your first summer in the Upper Valley, you knew all of that, and there’s more to the market that its appealing inventory. Opening day is a ritual as sacred as that of any baseball park. It means that summer, if not exactly here, is guaranteed. There will be days of sunshine. Even if masked, people can and will hike their half-filled cloth sacks onto their shoulders and pause to catch up with neighbors and friends who seem to have disappeared during a long winter. Never more true than during this pandemic year.

Norwich may be the earliest but it is not the only farmers’ market in the UV. The Lebanon Farmers Market will return to a newly spruced up Colburn Park in downtown Lebanon every Thursday from 4 pm to 7 pm, starting on May 20. According to Coordinator Jessica Giordani, people will once again be able to eat in the park. And live music is back. PapaGreyBeard (“music for baby boomers”—he’s good!) will play on opening day.

Hanover Parks and Rec is taking over the Hanover Farmers’ Market but at a new location. It is moving the market from the Dartmouth green to the Richmond Middle School on Route 10. The opening is scheduled for Wednesday, June 2.

For details, times, and the latest Covid-related policies (as of now, masks will be required), please check websites and Facebook pages for each market.

Photo, top, courtesy of Empty Nest Sewing, one of the vendors at Norwich Farmers’ Market. Credit: Stacey Hill.

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Welcome! You’re reading Artful, a blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley, and I hope you’ll subscribe and then share this with your friends and on your social media. 

And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.