Many downtown Madison residents and workers who find the Saturday morning farmers' market around Capitol Square too crowded or kitschy are well aware of its mid-week alternative. A smaller and more manageable version of the Dane County Farmers' Market is held on the 100 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard every Wednesday morning and early afternoon.
Since kicking off for the season two weeks ago, the Wednesday market has been building gradually, a couple dozen vendors lining both sides of the broad sidewalks between the City-County Building and the Madison Municipal Building. It was a bustling scene today shortly after noon, with many downtown workers taking their lunch break to pick up flowers, pastries, and assorted other eats as the Capitol Square hummed with the horn blasts and engine vibrations of the timber professionals truck rally, held every spring in support of the logging industry and jobs in the northern regions of Wisconsin.
Typically, April and May at a farmers' market in southern Wisconsin means asparagus, dry beans, greenhouse cucumbers and tomatoes, lettuce, maple syrup, rhubarb, spinach, bunch onions, hanging baskets, bedding plants, perennial plants, cut flowers, morel mushrooms, bakery goods, meat, cheese, other specialty items, at least as described by the Friends of the DCFM. Most of these items were in evidence on the boulevard Wednesday, particularly flowers both cut and in baskets. There were some veggies, too, namely asparagus, shallots, and tomatoes. For the most part though, it was your typical early spring offerings.
Photos from around the market this afternoon are available in the gallery at right. It will run every Wednesday this year through Halloween.
