For Victoria Krzywda, the Lower Burrell Farmers Market comes down to the hot sauce. On Saturday, the Leechburg resident perused 3 Shiba Farm’s myriad Mason jars and glass bottles of freshly brined pickles, peppers and relishes — not to mention the spiciest hot sauce Krzywda could find: the Arnold business’ blueberry scorpion pepper sauce. “Everybody in my family loves hot sauce — they put it on everything,” said Krzywda, 47, after buying two bottles of the spicy stuff.
“The stores have all the generic sauce, the stuff you can get anywhere,” she said. “There’s things you find here that you don’t find anywhere else. And I like small business.
Things like this help the farmers.” Krzywda was far from the only one this weekend who filled bags with fresh produce, farm-raised meats or seasonal fare. More than 60 vendors drew a crowd of hundreds to the Bon Air Elementary School parking lot Saturday to pick up hyper-local goods at the market’s annual fall festival, which also marked the close of its 2024 season.
The 2025 season will start around Memorial Day. Farmers markets are no small operation. At 113,000 farmers markets nationwide, only Californians spend more than shoppers do in Pennsylvania , according to the U.
S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers markets in the Keystone State generated $600 million in direct-to-consumer sales in 2022 — nearly 20% of all the money spent nationwide.
It’s not just big business, though, in the Alle-Kiski Valley. Mark.
