The first few years after the Bellingham Farmers Market was officially founded in 1993, opening day was celebrated with a Maypole gambit, said organic farmer Mike Finger, who was the president of the association at the time.
But the Maypole was logistically complicated and vulnerable to high winds.
Finger and his wife, Kim, brainstormed an alternative. They were drawn to the ceremony of the first pitch in baseball, he said.
“Instead of a baseball, we’d throw out — a farm-fresh egg? A bunch of kale? A kohlrabi? Those all seemed problematic. Ah, but a nice hard cabbage — that might work,” he said.
On the opening day of the new act, the idea was that city council member Arne Hannah and council president Mark Admundson would toss a cabbage to each other.
“However, they were given only vague instructions, and instead of a modest toss through the air, they instead stood 30 feet apart and it bounced off the pavement,” Finger said. “Less a baseball opener act, it seemed the two were developing a new method of coleslaw manufacture.”
Still, the event lives on. Mayor Kim Lund recently marked the 2024 farmers market opening with a cabbage toss on April 6.
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Isaac Stone Simonelli is CDN’s enterprise/investigations reporter; reach him at isaacsimonelli@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 127.
