Food Tree Field has lots of unusual variations of fruits and veggies
By: Wendy Weitzel for Davis Farmers Market
Want to taste some new vegetable and fruit varieties this year? The Food Tree Field stand at the Davis Farmers Market is a great place to start.
“The farm specializes in more unusual varieties,” said Barnini Lee, whose stepfather started it in the 1970s. “We’re committed to being a supplier of healthy produce, and teaching people about new varieties of things.”
Giant watermelons or squash can be intimidating to buyers, so the family sells many of its items as portioned cuts. For example, the Lunga di Napoli squash can reach about 100 pounds. It’s best to portion it out into manageable slices. They even clean out the seeds for you.
They know customers who try them are likely to return. “It’s common for customers to tell us they had the most amazing melon they ever had in their lives from our stall. And one guy this past season was 89. It’s really satisfying to hear that.”
Everything is ripe and ready to eat. And it most likely will have more flavor than anything they bought at a grocery store and had to ripen on the counter.
“I really like selling properly ripened honeydews and then hearing the surprised comments about how they aren’t horrible like store-bought honeydew,” he said. “It’s a challenge to get people to buy honeydew at first because the store stuff has a lot of people convinced that honeydew are generally not good.”
He should know. His stepfather Robert Hatfield used to sell to supermarkets. Now the farm just sells at farmers markets. At the Davis Farmers Market, Food Tree Field sells apples, apricots, Asian pears, Asian vegetables, beans, chard, chestnuts, cucumbers, eggplants, figs, fig jam, garlic, grapes, herbs, kumquats, melons, microgreens, onions, peaches, peppers, persimmons, plums, pomegranates, popcorn, potatoes, radishes, squash, tomatoes and watermelons.
Many of the varieties were developed on the farm, like their Hatfield figs, Lee said. It kind of tastes like a berry, and it’s more durable than typical area figs. “It has a thicker skin, so customers can select their own figs rather than us putting them in a basket. We use them for our fig jam,” which Lee’s mom, Bernice Hatfield, makes.
“Even the smaller stuff like melons, we have six to seven kinds of cantaloupe and four to five kinds of watermelon,” Lee said.
They also have Taiwanese tomatoes, which taste pre-salted. A popular winter staple is its Xingjian Noble Squash. “It’s the sweetest, creamiest squash we have,” Lee said.
Many of the varieties are a hit with Asian customers. Their family is from Taiwan, and they enjoy speaking Mandarin Chinese with many Davis shoppers.
Most of all, “We have a policy of never selling anything we won’t eat ourselves,” Lee said. “Both of my folks are cancer survivors or patients. We don’t spray anything or use any fertilizers. So, everything is perfectly healthy.”
Food Tree Field
Find them at the Davis Farmers Market every Saturday, rain or shine.
Farm location: Winters
Davis Farmers Market
Central Park, Fourth and C streets, Davis
Saturdays: 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., year-round
Wednesdays: 4 to 8 p.m. May through September for Picnic in the Park; 3 to 6 p.m. October through April
