Photos and story by Edward Boches
It’s still early on the fourth Friday of Eastham’s new weekly farmers market when the vendors burst into song. It’s a chorus of “Happy Birthday” for local herbalist Fiona Mulligan. There’s cake, too, made by Emanuele Rossi Curry, owner of Docito Homemade, the Yarmouth Port bakery that has a stand here.
The impromptu celebration is just the kind of camaraderie that defines the Outer Cape’s newest gathering spot for farmers, says market manager Mira Milkova.
Milkova — an administrator in the town’s finance department and a denizen of farmers markets who has helped organize this one — thinks it’s important for Eastham to have a place where people can talk directly with farmers to learn where and how their food is grown.
It all seems miraculous on this site. For years, the old T-Time driving range stood abandoned on Route 6. Townspeople voted to buy the 11-acre property in 2019 for $1.6 million with an eye to community uses, including affordable housing. But the purchase came with a deed restriction imposed by the seller, Stop & Shop, that effectively keeps Eastham a food desert through the end of this century: no food businesses are allowed on the land here. Stop & Shop, which is owned by Ahold Delhaize, a Dutch multinational corporation with annual sales of nearly $90 billion according to its 2024 annual report, has a history of purchasing land that might be attractive to competitors and using deed restrictions to keep them away.
Milkova is feeling good about the market’s momentum. So far, about 20 farmers and artisans are participating, she says, before setting out on her rounds checking in with vendors and talking with shoppers.
Rong Zheng Guo of Little G’s Garden in Eastham stands behind his display of squash blossoms, beans, and garlic scapes, greeting customers. A regular at both the Orleans and Wellfleet markets, Guo says the fledgling market is “getting better every week.”
Paula Duguay and Larry Gabriel of Sky Blue Farm in Orleans have herbal salves and goatmilk soap alongside carefully cleaned and trimmed garlic. Next to them, behind a table crammed with berries, peppers, onions, and green beans, Sigurd Winslow and Judy Scanlon of Lake Farm Gardens — 20-year veterans of the Orleans market — display produce they grow along with items sourced from other farms, supporting their neighboring town’s new venture.
Shoppers looking for flowers find familiar faces David Rai and his mother, Digree, of Down Home Farm in Truro, regulars at every Outer Cape market. When do they have time to farm? Digree, grinning ear to ear, replies, “at night.”
Held Friday mornings from 8 a.m. to noon at the former T-Time property on Route 6, the Eastham market offers everything you’d imagine: fresh vegetables and fruit, flowers, scallops, and other seafood brought in by local farmers and fisherfolk. Unlike some other farmers markets, Eastham’s also welcomes artisans.
Among them is Mulligan, there with oils and salves from her Healing Hands Apothecary, made from herbs she grows on plots whose soil she’s coaxed to life over what used to be a gravel pit in town. A nutritionist and herbalist, she studied and farmed in India, Peru, Ecuador, Spain, and Morocco before settling on Cape Cod.
Rick Martin shows off his ceramics featuring fossilized shark teeth, and his wife, Rosemary “Ra” Quantick, brings her ceramic lobsters and paintings of sea life inspired by her years working offshore. A handful of other craftspeople round things out.
The soundtrack is familiar: that’s Denya LeVine from Wellfleet playing the ukelele and singing Harry Belafonte classics.
