PORT ANGELES — Last year was a leap forward for the Port Angeles Farmers Market, and two organizers are determined to see it grow stronger in 2009.
The duo is Michele d’Hemecourt, the market manager who arrived in Port Angeles from North Carolina just in time for winter, and Jane Vanderhoof, who with her husband, Peter, runs the Westwind Farm near Joyce.
Vanderhoof was elected a week ago to the Washington Farmers Market Association Board of Directors during the association’s annual conference in Puyallup.
She’s been with the Port Angeles market since it was downtown on Laurel Street; when the City Council discontinued the market’s use permit, Vanderhoof and the other vendors moved out to the Clallam County Courthouse parking lot at Fourth and Peabody streets.
That location is less than ideal, Vanderhoof and d’Hemecourt agree, since they feel that few tourists find their way over.
The numbers tell the tale: In 2004 on Laurel Street the market grossed $186,652.
Outside the courthouse in 2006, the vendors brought in $163,825.
Tide turns
But last year, the tide started to turn: Sales reached $228,248.
Still, the Port Angeles market trails its Port Townsend and Sequim counterparts.
Port Townsend’s seven-month season last year grossed $802,912, with some 90 vendors drawing about 50,000 shoppers into Port Townsend.
The Open Aire Market, which brings about four dozen vendors into downtown Sequim on Saturdays from mid-May to mid-October, saw gross sales of $249,000 in 2008, up from $174,000 in 2006.
This winter, however, Vanderhoof and d’Hemecourt are invigorated by their trip to the state conference.
Vanderhoof sees a refreshed appetite for organic produce grown on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Westwind’s sales went up 33.7 percent from 2007 to 2008, she said, and Kia Armstrong of Nash’s Organic Produce, another Port Angeles market stalwart, reported a 32.6 percent increase.
“Tuna Dan” Dinwoodie, who sells halibut, salmon and albacore at the Port Angeles market, estimates a 25 percent rise in sales since he arrived a year and a half ago.
He sells fish caught in Neah Bay or Westport less than 48 hours before he sets up his booth and gives cooking advice — “scare it with the heat” — to hook dozens of loyal fans.
Dinwoodie makes the most of modern marketing, e-mailing his list of some 400 customers about which fish he’ll bring in each week.
To join the list, write to tunadan@centurytel.net.
Yet Dinwoodie is one of only 10 or 12 vendors who appear every winter Saturday, come sun, clobbering winds or cloaks of snow.
That slim number is another weakness of the market, d’Hemecourt said.
“Our market could be more of an event every weekend. We can make it something that people come to just for the experience,” she added.
All around the state, that’s happening.
Last year, sales jumped up 20 percent to 30 percent for the 100-plus members of the Washington Farmers Market Association, director Jackie Aitchison said on Thursday.
Sales up elsewhere
The Poulsbo market’s volume, she added, rose 60 percent.
“People want to know where their food’s coming from, and they want to keep their dollars local,” Aitchison said.
Both d’Hemecourt and Vanderhoof met people at the state conference who were shocked when they heard about Port Angeles’ market.
“You’re year-round?” they kept asking Vanderhoof.
“Yeah, we’re pretty crazy,” was her reply.
Seriously, “we’re year-round because we have a year-round growing climate” that yields diverse produce through all four seasons. “This maritime climate, by Washington standards, is mild,” Vanderhoof said.
The North Olympic Peninsula also has another uncommon resource: small-scale farmers, families eking out a living between their rows of strawberries and carrots.
Vanderhoof recently welcomed her son David Applbaum to Westwind.
Applbaum, 25, left a job as an accountant in Santa Monica, Calif., to come up and farm. On Thursday he was out planting shallots, so his mom sang his praises.
“He’s enjoying the challenge; he has a bit of his mother’s green thumb,” Vanderhoof said, adding that her offspring does it all, from weeding and seeding to working the Saturday market.
When asked about her hopes for 2009, Vanderhoof said she wants to form partnerships with other Port Angeles business groups.
And d’Hemecourt hopes to promote the produce in virtual ways: on www. Facebook.com and via e-mail updates on what’s freshest any given week.
Another of d’Hemecourt’s major goals for this year: development of a farmers’ market volunteer program. She can be reached at 360-460-0361. Other market information is at www. PortAngelesFarmersMarket.com.
“My vision,” d’Hemecourt said, “is a community venue for one-stop shopping for local products. To me, that’s the essence of the market.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
