Geneva Green Market: Geneva, Illinois - A Local Food Green Farmers Market

The Chicago Tribune August 6, 2008 Good Eating section featured an article entitled Roadside Americana: The farm stand has a place in our hearts- and we’re happy to report, on MapQuest too by Emily Nunn:

And with the help of readers, who sent us their favorites by e-mail and post (see list), we headed straight to two contrasting but charming examples of what “farm stand” (and even “family farm”) can mean today.

Now, we have hope for an America that cares more about farming to feed its people than farming to feed its cars.At the suggestion of Mary Ann Schwarzbach of Geneva, we drove 35 miles from the heart of Chicago past the modern menagerie of big brand-name stores, through affluent lanes of Lincolnshire to a different land altogether, to Prairie View, where we paid a surprise visit to Mary Sue Didier and her son, John, at Didier Farms.

They are part of a family that has hung on through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the land squeeze of suburban sprawl and the precipitous rise of global agribusiness giants like Cargill (whose profits from commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were 86 percent higher than the same period in 2007). Which is something special, because since the 1940s, the number of farms has dropped to 2 million from 6 million, according to census figures…

At their farm stand, they sell green beans, 20 kinds of peppers, three kinds of eggplant, zucchini, broccoli, tomatoes, green beans, basil, and cauliflower, among other crops, all of which is farmed on 80 acres, within view of Mary Sue’s peony patch, which is where she was standing when we popped in on her, tending her flowers, dressed in robin’s-egg blue slacks, a blue flowered top, navy beads, and bob earrings. (Their specialty, sweet corn, is farmed on another plot in DeKalb County).

“All this was farmland,” Mary Sue said, gesturing toward Aptakisic Road and beyond. “We knew all our neighbors, and they were all farmers. You could tell who was driving by the way their truck sounded on the gravel road,” she said…

…A half-hour away, in Lake Villa, Ida and Sal Filippo, who came to the U.S. from Calabria, Italy, years ago, seem to have to worry much less about adapting as they pursue a different version of the American Dream: the retirement farm stand. They started Ida and Sal’s Produce eight years ago, according to their daughter-in-law, Angelina Filippo, who tipped us off by e-mail. (”The fruit of [Sal's] labor is amazing,” she wrote…

Of special note were the Farm Stands located in the Fox Valley area:

Keller’s Farm Stand, 516 Knoch Knolls Rd., Naperville, 630-369-5319
Klein’s Farm & Garden Market, 1175 Lillian St. , Elgin, 847-683-9647:
Norton Produce, 39 W369 Rte. 64, St. Charles, 630-377-8118