It’s hard to believe that the first Healdsburg Farmers’ Market opened 47 years ago—in 1978, when Jimmy Carter was president, Close Encounters landed in theaters and Kool-Aid was the most popular drink in Jonestown, Guyana.
Time to turn the page: This Saturday, the Healdsburg Certified Farmers’ Market (HCFM) opens its aisles, tents and tables once again at 8:30am until noon, once more at the West Plaza Parking lot at North and Vine streets. More than 50 vendors, selling fresh produce to packaged food to farm-raised eggs and meats to crafts, will return to what is for many their favorite market, open every Saturday into December.
“Shopping the market keeps local agriculture and small business alive and thriving, and gives attendees a bountiful selection of very fresh, delicious and often unique goods,” said Janet Ciel, market manager since 2017. “Farmers’ markets, in general, are often testing grounds for new business, so there can be produce or products not found anywhere else.”
Pavilion Plans
This year brings an added level of transformation to the Healdsburg Farmers’ Market: Sometime late this summer or early in fall—certainly by the end of the Farmers’ Market season on Dec. 20—the market will be the first to move into the remodeled Cerri Building, henceforth to be known as the Foley Family Community Pavilion.
“This is a big year for the market,” Ciel said. “At the end of this year, everything is going to be completely different.”
When the market does move to the Foley Pavilion, it will set up under the pavilion and in the parking lot next to it, and even on a blocked-off North Street itself. “All the produce will be on North Street—otherwise we wouldn’t fit,” Ciel said.
Board Chair
Also new this year is the board chair, Shalie Gaskill Jonker. A former Silicon Valley executive who with her husband owns a vegetable farm on Kinley Road—called, misleadingly, Noble Goat Farm—Jonker sees her involvement with the market as not that dissimilar from selling software.
“I spent my entire career in go-to-market and customer-facing roles. You know, whether you’re selling technology or you’re selling broccoli, customers want a good product and they want to work with good people,” Jonker said.
Those good people, vendors and customers, are what makes the Healdsburg Farmers’ Market so successful. “On Saturday mornings, it is the community gathering space,” Jonker said. “And you see a slice of the community that is full-through. You’ve got families, you’ve got kids, you’ve got people that have been here for five generations.”Something for Everyone
Not to be overlooked: “And you’ve got tourists, people who are only here for the weekend.” That brings us to another new project being introduced this year that will give those tourists something to remember Healdsburg by, other than another empty wine bottle: a lavishly illustrated full-color book that includes history, gardening tips and recipes—Farm + Market: Healdsburg.
It will be written and photographed by Liza Gershman, now in the midst of a successful publishing career that’s taken her from Sonoma County to Nantucket, Cuba, China and back home. A Bennett Valley native, she returned to Healdsburg in late 2022.
“I was the associate chair of photography for Savannah College of Art and Design, and had been there for a few years and was missing home,” she told The Tribune. “When I thought about where in Sonoma County I would like to live, Healdsburg was my first choice.”
Being a food-conscious writer and photographer, it didn’t take long for her to connect with the Farmers’ Market. One market morning she walked up out of the blue to Jonker because she was attracted by the design of her farmstand. “I’m very visual and it looked like it came right out of a Martha Stewart magazine,” she said.
The two struck up a friendship, and when Jonker became chair of the market’s board of directors earlier this year, they agreed to produce the book that Gershman had in mind: A photo-heavy book of stories, profiles, recipes and portraits of Healdsburg as seen through its market and agriculture.
“When I got hired, everybody made it clear that this is a very historic and important market,” Ciel said. “We are very, very invested in keeping this market as important as possible.” A book such as the one Gershman suggested would help demonstrate that priority.
Gershman has already started work on the project, and the intent is to have it available for purchase in time for Merry Healdsburg as a potential gift item. Meanwhile she’ll be contributing a twice-monthly column for The Healdsburg Tribune to be titled, appropriately, “Farm + Market.”
Price of Produce
Ironically, this point in history is more pointed than most, with the recent tariff crisis launched by the president, a crisis local farmers’ markets are faced with at ground level.
“I do think we’ll see food prices at the grocery store impacted by some of this,” Jonker said. “So that piece won’t affect the local farms, but where it might is any sort of machinery that we would need to purchase, fertilizer … Anything that could potentially have come, or ingredients could have come, from overseas.”
Prices are likely to rise in grocery stores first, because their sources are often international, but as Jonker said, “I think in a weird way, it helps the Farmers’ Market because the food itself is grown here. It isn’t subject to tariffs.”
It’s already becoming evident that prices in the supermarket and prices at farmers’ markets are becoming closer: $10 per dozen eggs, for example. “I’m hoping people will come out to the markets just ’cause they should be shopping at the farmers’ market,” said Ciel, the market’s manager for the past eight years.
“I think one of the things that people don’t think about is how long the produce lasts,” she continued. “So you buy from a farmer’s market that was picked that morning or the night before, but when you buy from a grocery store, that same head of lettuce, it’s three or four or five days in a freaking truck before you ever get it to your home!”
Jonker joined in: “I would say we’re pretty lucky to live in a county and have farms that are participating that really pay attention to how they’re farming. The quality of the produce is better. The process by which it was grown is better for the earth, and ultimately for our customers.”
The year’s first Healdsburg Certified Farmers’ Market is this Saturday, then it will continue weekly until Dec. 20. The Tuesday-morning HCFM is also coming back this year, from May 13 – Sept. 30. Other information including performing musicians is available at healdsburgfarmersmarket.org.
‘Farm + Market: Healdsburg,’ a 240-page, full-color hardcover, will be published in late 2025, price TBA. Proceeds will benefit Healdsburg Certified Farmers’ Market. For more information, visit healdsburgbook.com.
