When Craig Borner drove up to the Ojo Caliente Farmers’ Market Oct. 3 to unload bushels of apples and an aging cider press from the flatbed of his black vintage pick-up, customers were already waiting.
Borner and his wife, Catherine, are volunteer firefighters, and returned around noon that day from a morning of answering medical calls, sweaty, but ready to start pressing fresh juice for a group of eager neighbors.
“This is some good apple juice,” Andy Reckeweg, who recently moved to Ojo Caliente from Baltimore, Md., said. “Compare this to what you get at grocery store — nah, you can’t find something like this.”
The farmers’ market opened for its first season July 18, and the Borners — who squeeze juice on-site with a roughtly 120-year-old, wood-and-cast-iron press and apples from their backyard orchard — quickly became a popular fixture. At the height of the growing season, the market averaged 80 customers and one dozen vendors, mostly from Ojo Caliente and surrounding towns, market co-organizer Caterina Di Palma said.
“Not bad for our first year,” Di Palma said. “So far we’ve tried to stick with local vendors. We wanted it to be a local market.”
The market’s start this year was serendipitous. Di Palma, an acupuncturist and massage therapist, was shopping around for an alternative-medicine-related grant from the federal Agriculture Department and instead wound up getting an $800 market start-up grant from the New Mexico Farmers Marketing Association, she said.
“The idea (for a market) had been floating around in my head for close to 10 years, but I had never gone anywhere with it,” Di Palma said.
Di Palma used the money to buy tents, tables and advertising, then she and former Mesa Vista High School basketball coach and El Rito gardener Eddie Campos started recruiting area gardeners and farmers. At its peak, in late August, the market featured live herbs from a Carson grower, greens and cucumbers from Campos’ garden and assorted produce from Velarde.
“(The Velarde farmers) had chile and tomatoes before any of us up here did,” Di Palma said.
By Oct. 3, however, frost had reduced the market’s assortment to only four vendors and a slow trickle of customers. Two customers, Sarah Green and Kate Barrera, both of Ojo Caliente, stopped by the market that morning to buy some greens and instead left with eggs from Peggy Montoya’s flock and apples from Jose Antonio Lopez’s orchard.
“I’ve been coming to the market pretty regularly since it opened,” Green said. “They had lots of good vegetables and tomatoes.”
Di Palma and Campos planned to keep the market open through Oct. 31. Due to the frost, however, they now plan to put an official end to the market season Oct. 18 with a harvest pot-luck from noon to 2 p.m.
“I already have some ideas for next year,” Di Palma said. “We want to get some student volunteers to help manage the market and have more activities.”