"Eating is the single most important thing we can do to stay healthy.
If good, clean food isn't worth our money, what is?"
Darin Olien
nutrition + superfood specialist
Photos: Emily Harvey
Here at The Bradford Market, we try to source our produce as locally as possible. With that being said, our produce will rotate throughout the year depending on what is growing in season. We know this can be a struggle when you are looking for fresh tomatoes in December, for example, but we hope that you can be up to the (not so big) challenge of eating in season.
Eating seasonally has many benefits, including supporting your local farmers and getting the highest nutrients your fruits and vegetables have to offer. The longer a fruit or vegetable is separated from the plant, the less nutrients it has available to you. Therefore, it is best to buy your produce from farms as close to your home as possible, if not right from your own garden. Plants put all of their effort into filling their "fruit" with as many nutrients as possible, and the height of this nutrition happens when fruit is allowed to mature and ripen while still attached to the plant. Most fruit and vegetables in grocery stores are picked before they are ripe so that they are not spoiled by the time they arrive at their destination; hence, less nutrients are available in what you are eating.
In an effort to be candid and to encourage our customers to think about where their food is coming from, we will always have every variety of produce labeled with how the produce was grown and where it is from. While some items may come across the country (such as citrus, avocados, etc.), we are still purchasing from smaller family owned farms, and are not feeding into the big agribusiness "farms" where most grocery store produce is sourced.
A lot of our vegetables come directly from the Bradford family, and are organically grown here on the farm. We also source our produce directly from other local farmers, and work with local produce distributors: happy dirt (Durham, NC) and freshlist (Charlotte, NC). If you are interested in learning more about them, you can find links to our local farmers and produce distributors below.
You can receive a weekly list of the produce we have in stock by signing up for our newsletter here.
Eating seasonally has many benefits, including supporting your local farmers and getting the highest nutrients your fruits and vegetables have to offer. The longer a fruit or vegetable is separated from the plant, the less nutrients it has available to you. Therefore, it is best to buy your produce from farms as close to your home as possible, if not right from your own garden. Plants put all of their effort into filling their "fruit" with as many nutrients as possible, and the height of this nutrition happens when fruit is allowed to mature and ripen while still attached to the plant. Most fruit and vegetables in grocery stores are picked before they are ripe so that they are not spoiled by the time they arrive at their destination; hence, less nutrients are available in what you are eating.
In an effort to be candid and to encourage our customers to think about where their food is coming from, we will always have every variety of produce labeled with how the produce was grown and where it is from. While some items may come across the country (such as citrus, avocados, etc.), we are still purchasing from smaller family owned farms, and are not feeding into the big agribusiness "farms" where most grocery store produce is sourced.
A lot of our vegetables come directly from the Bradford family, and are organically grown here on the farm. We also source our produce directly from other local farmers, and work with local produce distributors: happy dirt (Durham, NC) and freshlist (Charlotte, NC). If you are interested in learning more about them, you can find links to our local farmers and produce distributors below.
You can receive a weekly list of the produce we have in stock by signing up for our newsletter here.
The chart below provides helpful information on when you can expect
particular seasonal produce items to be available in our market.
Please note, this list is not comprehensive of everything we may carry at any given time
during the year; it simply provides estimated details on local/regional items in season.
Seasonal Produce Chart by happy dirt