PTown's Award-Winning Farmers Market: Fresh Produce, Eggs, Jams, Crafts, More

Freshly picked produce has greater flavor and nutritional value than store-bought.

Provincetown Farmers Market has once again been named as the best farmers market on the Outer Cape.
Every year, readers and editors of Cape Cod Life magazine vote for their favorites among hundreds of restaurants, shops and attractions throughout Cape Cod, and 2018 is the second year in a row that our own farmers market in Provincetown has been granted the "Gold" award in our region.
Fresh fruits, vegetables and eggs are just the beginning here. Selection might vary a bit from week to week, but you'll always find a great array of specialties made by local farmers, like organic meat products, homemade preserves, a splendid, aged, balsamic vinegar or pure, unadulterated, local honey.
Find the farmers market on Ryder Street, next to Town Hall, every Saturday from May 12th to November 17th, from 9 AM to 3PM.

Mmmm! PTown Farmers Market...

I had these gorgeous fresh black raspberries for lunch last Saturday,
from one of the stalls at Provincetown's fabulous Farmers Market.

Provincetown has a Farmers Market next to its Town Hall every Saturday from 11 AM till 4 PM, from May through November, and perhaps beyond.

Find not only this beautiful, fresh local produce and fresh-cut flowers, but some unexpected items, as well as treats made from other farm-fresh articles, too. You'll often even find meats and seafood.

You'll routinely find things like honey from local beekeepers, jams, crafts like sachets made from flowers and herbs grown without any pesticides or poisons, and many other things that are better for us than typical supermarket foods, and things that are grown in a way that's better for the planet, as well.

A reviewer on yelp raved over an expensive balsamic vinegar, saying it was absolutely worth every penny. Another reviewer there suggested people taking the ferry back home to Boston should shop here and support these small farmers while saving money over city prices for beautiful produce.

I can still taste the strawberries I bought from one of these farmers last summer, and a couple of times I've even had freshly shucked oysters for my lunch, as a shell fisherman shucked each oyster just for me from a crate of ice in the back of his pickup truck. It just doesn't get any fresher than that.

You never know what you'll find at our Farmers Market, but there's always a variety of things that may be unexpected, as well as impeccably fresh, beautiful fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs from nearby small farmers, women and men who have tenderly grown these things with love and care. Show them some support, and be a bit healthier, too, when you choose things from these wonderful, small independent farmers.

Lewis Brothers Homemade Ice Cream Returns for 17th Season in Provincetown

It was too cold to eat your ice cream outdoors today, but business was still
brisk as Lewis Brothers served up homemade ice cream, made right here.

Spring brings our summer favorites back for business up and down Commercial Street. Even though the weather has been quite chilly most days, people still want ice cream. That's what you do on vacation. Ice cream is fun!
The Lewis Brothers have been making their terrific homemade ice cream right in their Commercial Street shop since 1999. Several varieties of ice cream are churned out fresh every day, among them the 20 flavors you'll always find on the menu, along with a number of more exotic choices that may turn up on any given day.
My favorite is ginger, a special ice cream the Lewis Brothers created for a Commercial Street restaurant's dessert menu several years ago. Though the restaurant is gone now, thankfully this unique flavor turns up on the board several times over the summer, with dozens of others that may be the flavor of the week at any given time. Standard favorites like black raspberry, cookie dough or maple walnut are listed alongside of specialties like chocolate mint Oreo, Grape Nut or green tea. And if you're traveling with kids, watch out for the adult flavors, like chocolate Guinness, Limoncello, white Russian or half-a-dozen others that are made with a bit of alcohol. Yum!
If you're watching your calories or sugar, there are choices for you, too. Chocolate or vanilla soft serve, along with orange or rainbow sherbet, are all 95% fat-free, and 100% fat-free frozen yogurt comes in vanilla or peach. There's also sugar-free ice cream in vanilla or butter pecan, and fruit smoothies or frozen fruit purées are available.

Generous servings make Lewis Brothers a
 popular Provincetown ice cream destination.

Of course, if you want to go completely in the opposite direction, you can get a classic banana split, or a giant sundae drenched in homemade hot fudge or any of 20 toppings like rainbow or chocolate sprinkles, walnuts, Gummy Bears, Butterfinger crumble, M&Ms, strawberries, Oreo crumble or homemade whipped cream.
I order my sundae with vanilla ice cream, caramel sauce, a little whipped cream and marshmallow, sprinkled with chopped almonds and, of course, the ubiquitous cherry on top. I order the small sundae. I'm not sure if I could finish the large one.
An awful lot of folks consider Lewis Brothers Ice Cream a must on every visit to PTown, and in the summer you can find them in Truro as well when they bring their solar powered ice cream truck to the beaches, and on Mondays they are scooping ice cream at the Truro Farmers Market from 8 AM till noon. You'll find them at other events around the Cape, and you can book them for your own party or event.
Another reason we love Lewis Brothers is because they are a green business. They do their best to help the planet and to protect the fragile ecosystem that surrounds us, hence the solar powered ice cream truck. They have achieved a Level One Cape and Islands Green Certification, and we thank them for their commitment to the environment and for their terrific ice cream!

Find Glorious Fresh Produce at Farmers Market and Other Local Spots

There's nothing like really fresh produce, found every Saturday, all summer
long, at Provincetown's farmers market, across Ryder Street from Town Hall.

I managed to get to the farmers market this afternoon just as all the vendors were packing up. I was after some fresh strawberries, and was lucky enough to find a couple of farmers from Dartmouth, Massachusetts, still able to get to the strawberries they had already loaded into their truck for the drive home. I got some beautiful, juicy, perfectly ripe berries, at the peak of their flavor, and probably their nutritional value as well.
They had that smooth, shiny look of impeccably fresh fruit. Really fresh strawberries look different from the ones you typically find in supermarkets. They feel different, too, and they certainly taste different from fruit that has been picked before its prime and shipped across the country.
It's no secret that a lot of supermarket produce travels hundreds or thousands of miles to get to a big warehouse somewhere, and from there it's put on another truck for another ride, maybe to a regional distributor, and perhaps yet another ride before it finally gets to the supermarket. All that travel uses a lot of fuel, creates a lot of pollution, and the food loses nutrients by the minute once it is picked, so the farther it has to travel, the more nutrients are lost, and the fewer vitamins and minerals are available for your body to use once the food finally makes it all the way to your table. A lot of it also has to be picked before it's actually ripe so it won't go bad while making its cross-country journey, or worse, traveling across international borders. A lot of fruit, for example, travels from Chile to get to American supermarkets.
A much better system is to buy food grown as close to you as possible. That way it isn't harvested before it's ripe, it doesn't use a lot of fuel for delivery, and it retains more nutrients because it gets to your table so much faster.

Purple and green beans from Lucky Field Organics, about
17 miles off the cape, have been found at our farmers market.

I found a web page for the Provincetown Farmers Market that will show you some examples of what might be found at this market week by week, and if you click around a bit on the page you can read about many small farms all over the cape and beyond. I learned about a small company in Westport, MA, that's found at our farmers market each week with a variety of cheeses from three different Massachusetts farms, as well as organic olive oils, balsamic vinegars, and chocolate products from small farms in Italy. Small farmers generally offer the best foods.
Other booths at our farmers market may offer their own jams and fruit spreads, or fresh herbs, or eggs. Fresh baked goods are often available, along with, of course, all kinds of fresh produce. It's hard to predict everything that might turn up from week to week, but at this time of year you'll likely find arugula, green beans, radishes, peas, spinach, a variety of lettuces and salad greens, and strawberries, among others.
If you don't mind traveling a bit, there's a web page to show you dozens of small Cape Cod farms where you can get fresh produce, eggs, honey, dairy products, flowers and bedding plants, herbs... you name it. There are several spots where you can "pick your own" when the crop is at its peak. Later in the season you'll be able to pick blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and many others.

From Truro to PTown, these greens traveled about 7 miles.

You can also often find fresh local produce at small neighborhood markets, like Far Land Provisions, at 150 Bradford Street. They get hydroponic mixed salad greens from Hillside Farm in Truro, so the food travels only about seven miles to get here, and it could be on your table in a day or less after it's harvested.
Did you know organic eggs are produced right here in PTown? You can get those at Far Land, too. I've found local tomatoes there, and other things as they are available. They also sell Wellfleet Sea Salt, which is an all-natural and eco-friendly product, using repurposed oyster floats in its production.
Bradford Natural Market, at 141 Bradford Street, often has locally grown tomatoes and other produce. I once got some really beautiful multicolored peppers there that were so delicious that I ate them for my lunch for a couple of days, munching them down just like you would an apple.
Try eating more ultra-fresh, local produce for a week or two, and see if your body doesn't notice the difference. See you at the farmers market every Saturday till early November, in the little parking lot across Ryder Street from Town Hall.