Published: May 09, 2008 08:59 pm         

Farmers market planned for Nappanee

Nappanee residents Tim and Linda Smith moved to Nappanee from Ann Arbor, Michigan about three years ago. They joined St. John’s Lutheran Church, 655 S. Main St., Nappanee, and recently decided they wanted to provide a community outreach to make people more aware of their church and provide a service the couple enjoyed in their former hometown — a farmer’s market.

Smith said Ann Arbor had a large farmer’s market that he and his wife enjoyed visiting. Since moving to Nappanee they’ve occasionally frequented Goshen’s Farmers market but Smith said, “We were surprised Nappanee didn’t have one.”

Smith said the congregation at St. John’s is small and he feels the church kind of blends into the neighborhood and people may not realize how active the church members are, so he thought sponsoring a farmer’s market at the church would be a way to help serve the neighborhood and community as well as draw attention to the church.

Holding a farmer’s market at the church will allow people living in the neighborhood to walk over to patronize the market. Plans are to hold the farmer’s market each Saturday morning beginning June 21 and running through mid-August.

“If the enthusiasm is there and the traffic is there, we’ll go until the good weather holds,” he said.

Right now Smith is looking for vendors who want to be a part of the farmer’s market.

“Ideally, we’d like to have three to five vegetable/fruit and food vendors to get the farmer’s market off the ground.”

Smith would also like to open it up to craft vendors selling handcrafted items, too. He also envisions service organizations like Family Christian Development Center, Boys & Girls Club and Open Door to have information tables to inform the public of the services they provide.

St. John’s has a church cookbook that will likely be sold at the farmer’s market and he would like to open that up to other churches that might have similar products to sell.

“We’d like to make it a communitywide event. The fee we’d charge for vendor space would be donated to the Open Door,” Smith said. “It would be a good problem if it grows to the point where we have to move from the church parking lot to a bigger location downtown,” he added.