Marketing in Santa Fe

The Santa Fe Farmers Market continues a four-decade tradition of sharing fresh produce with local residents. Vendors offer an enormous array of chiles each fall, in addition to items that might appear in markets across the country. Santa Feans adore their chiles and often freeze them for use throughout the year.

But there's more to the fall market than chiles. Over 100 vendors sell miniature vegetables, fresh raspberries (this is their season in the Land of Enchantment), local chutneys and honey, goat's milk cheeses, and pistachios and pinon nuts. The market also sells chicos - corn roasted in a traditional adobe 'horno' oven, allowed to dry on a tin roof, and cooked so the kernels are chewy and nutty. Chicos frequently pair with frijoles (beans) or meat and chiles.

All vegetables, fruits and nursery plants at the Santa Fe Farmers Market are grown in northern New Mexico, and at least 80 percent of the ingredients and materials used to create craft items. In addition, all products sold by vendors are grown by the same vendors. No matter what time of year you visit Santa Fe, there's always something tasty and fresh available at the market.

Hanging Chiles in the Land of Enchantment

New Mexico visitors are accustomed to seeing red chiles that decorate adobe buildings in the form of 'ristras,' as they twist and twirl in gentle breezes. But there's more to strings of hanging chiles than decoration. Throughout the rural countryside between Santa Fe and Taos, chile growers know the best way to dry their chiles for use in cooking is by tying them together on long strands, and then allowing them to hang until they wrinkle and shrink under the state's intense sun rays.

For farmers with crops that yield a dozen or even 16 bushels, vertical strings may not sufficiently accommodate the massive quantities of chiles that must be dried. Clotheslines morph into drying apparatus and random pieces of rope strung below house eaves offer extra drying space. During the early fall harvest season chiles simultaneously become revered cooking ingredient and integral decorative element throughout New Mexican farm land.