Sunday Shopping

We've been buying our weekly groceries at the Hollywood Farmers Market for over a decade. While seasons can be tough to discern in Los Angeles — especially with recent temperatures like 100° in March! — we enjoy watching seasonal produce rotate through the market.

While asparagus is available 9 months of the year, red peppers appear in late August and leave in December. Blink and you miss cherry season. All apples — even storage apples — are gone by May, only to reappear fresh and crisp in late July.

So returning to the market after skipping a week always seems like an adventure. I had expected red peppers to make their arrival — and they did — but I didn't expect netting to be draped everywhere, or that Ha's Apple Farm stand would not be there.

It was quite disconcerting.

It seems a mysterious foreign fruit fly has emerged on the streets of Hollywood, and the farmers were asked to spread netting to prevent the flies from laying eggs on their produce which would travel for miles in customers' shopping bags, possibly creating widespread damage to local farms. Prevention is great — especially non-toxic approaches like netting — but it sure looked weird.

Even weirder was the lack of Ha's Apple Farm stand, which we have depended on for years for eggs and apples. Rumor has it they'll be gone for 6 months. I hope they're okay. Market officials would not tell me anything specific.

So, an unsettling morning. Fortunately Finley Farms had red peppers, so my plans to over-indulge in them this week are intact.

Here's what we came home with:
4 potatoes, garlic, 2 yellow onions, 2 red onions, cilantro, dill, chives, 7 red peppers, 6 corn, butter lettuce, romaine lettuce, 2 cucumbers, 6 plum tomatoes, 2 dozen eggs (one from Jared, one from Rick), 2 melons, shisito peppers, small orange lipstick peppers, 12 oranges and 4 grapefruit.

And Russ sharpened a knife for us while we shopped.