Shoppers scoop up produce, wares at Willow market

WILLOW — Everything here has a story.

There’s the woman whose husband gave her sawmill so she’s here selling picnic tables, birdhouses and flower boxes she made from lumber she milled.

There’s the man who uses his lathe to turn trees that grew in his yard for years into bowls, toothpick holders and pestle and mortar.

In all, 21 vendors from Anchorage, Palmer, Willow and Big Lake sold their wares from 2 to 7 p.m., Friday at the Willow Farmers Market, Mile 69 of the Parks Highway. Some shoppers were local folks there to scoop up fresh, locally grown vegetables and others were passing by on the highway and stopped.

Valley resident Suzanne Bach and her husband stopped across the highway to gas up their RV en route to Fairbanks for the Summer Arts Festival.

Bach bought lettuce, onions and other produce she said would be part of their meals this weekend.

“This is really a nice market,” she said. “Everything here is worth stopping to see.”

The onions she purchased came from the Bergey Family Farm in Palmer.

Tom Bergey said he sells his produce at the Willow market and farther north at a farmers market near the entrance to Denali National Park. He said he makes the drive every weekend since his wife got a job in Healy and the money he makes at the markets pays for his gas.

Friday his wares included basil, lemon basil, sage, cilantro, dill, chives, rosemary, kale, romaine, butter crunch and iceberg lettuce, onion, radishes, cabbage and jars of jam his wife made.

Bergey said he’s always grown food to feed his family, but these days he also plants extra to sell.

“It’s a nice hobby,” he said.

Other vendors offered an assortment of handmade wooden bowls, strawberry plant starts, handmade cards, jewelry, whirligigs, kettle corn, roasted flavored almonds, salsa and Alaska teas and flavored honey.

Willow Health Organization Treasurer Nina Davidson said the group started the farmers market 30 years ago to create an opportunity for local people to buy and sell local things.

Market manager Maggie Lush said vendors may book space for one week or the whole season, which ends Sept. 22. A 10x10 space costs $13 a week and a covered space of the same size costs $26.

So far, Lush said attendance at the market has been good. The first week, 325 people stopped to shop and 371 came last week. And Friday, 395 people attended the market.

“Promoting the community is what we are all about,” Lush said.

Bonny and Jim Salsberry live in Willow and sell their kettle corn here, at the south Anchorage market and the market at the Northway Mall. In addition to regular sweet and salty kettle corn, they also make flavors like English toffee and habanero.

“Everybody likes it,” Bonny said. “For people like me with food allergies, it’s a safe alternative compared to most stuff.”

As she swishes popcorn around in a large steel tub to mix in the flavoring, holes in the bottom of the tub strain out kernels that didn’t pop.

“It’s simple, allergy free, gluten free and dolphin safe,” Jim said.

Every week they say they use 150 pounds of popcorn. And when they have old popcorn that can’t be sold, it goes to friends’ chickens and some goes to the chickadees in their yard, Bonny said.

The chickadees have such a fondness for the sweet and salty corn that they have learned how to break into their garage, Jim said.

“It took them about four days to figure out how to get in and back out,” he said. Until then, the couple said they had to open the door for them to get out.

A few booths away sits Greg DeHart, an independent “reliv” distributor. “reliv” is a line of nutritional products he said he feels compelled to market after they worked wonders in his own life.

“It’s a more complete food source than we usually get,” he said.

DeHart said it’s been very rewarding to see lives changed when people’s bodies get the nutrients needed.

At the next stall is Dean Halstead of Willow, who got his start selling items turned on his lathe back in 1996 when he noticed an absence of good quality fish whackers.

“I saw that there was a lack of quality fish whackers,” he said.

So Halstead said he made and sold 200 Susitna Smackers and bought himself a new lathe.

He’s expanded his creations to include plates, bowls of varying sizes and designs, toothpick holders, pepper grinders and pestle and mortars turned from woods like maple, apple, birch and Myrtlewood.

Halstead said he buys logs wholesale, then has the logs milled, cuts them into chunks, turns the wood to a rough approximation of its finished shape and then puts the wood away to dry for six months to a year.

When it’s dry, the wood is turned a second time, then it is sanded — some to as fine as 1,000-grit, Halstead said — then he applies a finish he mixes himself from food-grade walnut oil, beeswax and Carnauba wax, harvested from palm trees in Brazil.

Each bowl is unique. Each one has a story and each one has its own name, Halstead said.

When the power company took down an old-growth maple in his neighborhood, he salvaged the tree. And so was born a bowl called “The End of August.”

The littlest bowl of the bunch is named “Mamma Do You Love Me,” after the beloved book illustrated by Alaska artist Barbara Lavalle, said Teresa Nelson, who names the bowls.

“They speak to me,” she said.

Tami McKellar is the Willow woman whose husband gave her a sawmill.

“I got him a rototiller for Father’s Day and he gave me a sawmill,” she said.

Friday she was selling picnic tables, planter boxes, buckets and dogsleds with flower boxes in their tiny baskets.

Next to her display was the Jonesers booth selling teas picked locally in the Willow area and honeys in flavors such as ginger, sage, fireweed, rosehip, blueberry, raspberry and chocolate.

“It’s real Alaska made stuff,” said Sarah McCurdy, who was just filling in for the family running the booth.

There’s also the Salsa Man Larry Jacobson who has made and sold homemade salsa for 40 years. He makes salsa in varying degrees of heat — very mild, mild, medium, hot, extra hot and what da.

“I’m retired, this is my hobby,” Jacobson said.

He said his business model is simple: “My goal is to leave with less salsa than I came with.”

Dean Davidson managed the market for two years before opening Dean’s Dogs Gone Wild. He said he tried to recruit food vendors and couldn’t so he set up shop.

Janet Vale was packing away her bowls carved from burls, hand-tied flies and other wares at the end of the day. But she still made time to talk and show off a unique “survival kit” her husband makes for Alaska girls and those who wish they were — earrings adorned with hand-tied flies that could double as a fishhook in an emergency.

For more information, or to reserve booth space, contact 495-9090.

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.