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Grapevine Articles

Collection of featured articles from the weekly market newsletter, known as the Grapevine. Subscribe today and never miss a thing!

Filtering by Category: Vendor Profiles

Diving in with Deck Family Farm

Olivia Spitzer

There are those who say that living on a farm is like going to school. Then there are those who build their business around that idea. John and Christine Deck, the couple behind Deck Family Farm, have invested two decades into a unique blend of business and education. It’s hard to separate their farm from their intern program, or from their land, from their herd, or from their community. And it was all built to be exactly that way.

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Good Wolf, Probiotic Wolf

Olivia Spitzer

“The PNW is a bizarre place for many reasons. One of the peculiarities and the beauty is our strong community.” As head of sales for a small PNW company, it is Trevor Lampert’s job to know. “People have so much support for the small players, the local businesses. We always planned for our farmers markets to be our foundation – we never expected it to be this successful.” Lampert spearheads the team for Good Wolf, a probiotic tonic company.

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Growing a Lifetime of Flowers

Olivia Spitzer

They say hindsight is 20/20. For Patricia Dabush of Meadowbrook Gardens, her past can feel like highway 20 - and it has always led right to where she is today. “My parents weren’t really farmers. They were like Green Acres – [part of] the ‘back to land’ers movement. [They] were getting older and thinking about selling the property. I wanted to raise my kids like I was raised, play in the creek, and throw rocks – I wanted to live on the land. I was like, ‘Wait! Don’t sell the property!’”

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Building Babkush

Olivia Spitzer

“I kept saying ‘I’m going to start small and see if it has legs.’ And at every sort of step people were like, ‘make more!’” If you’ve tried Zicra Lukin’s babka then you know what those people were talking about. Babkush, Lukin’s pandemic-grown Jewish bakery, has the kind of products that make everyone scream for more.

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Famigila e Ravioli

Olivia Spitzer

This is a love story. It begins, like so many do, with a dinner beside the sea. Imagine, if you will, the waves, the soft light, the couple. Except in this story, our protagonists are not dining together. They’re not in the same room. He’s not actually dining at all.

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Your Local Chocolatier

Olivia Spitzer

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it feels like the whole world is suddenly thinking about chocolate. We all have our cheap chocolate favorites, but you cannot deny the glorious indulgence that is fine, quality chocolate - chocolate to enjoy with a glass of wine, or a sweet sunset, or a close friend at the end of a long day. Cloudforest’s chocolate is that second kind –the exquisite and nuanced kind.

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Argentinian Flavors Come to Hillsdale

Olivia Spitzer

Chimichurri is a traditional Argentinian sauce made from cilantro, parsley, garlic, oils, and chiles. The result is a tangy, savory green sauce that is ready for any dish. It can be used as a marinade, a topping, a salad dressing, or a stand-alone dip. Jessica Causey, the woman behind La Porteña describes chimichurri as an everything sauce – and it truly can be.

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The Bardo Between Science and Magic

Olivia Spitzer

“There’s a whole invisible world that you’re working with, that you’re trying not to have work against you. A lot of things can go wrong. There’s a lot of what feels like magic involved – things you never really know until you see the results.” This is not the tagline for the next best-selling sci-fi novel. This is daily life for Troy Plemmons, the farmer behind Harvest Moon Mushrooms.

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Becoming the Cookie Guy

Olivia Spitzer

Draw your mind back to the summer of 2020, when many pandemic lockdown measures were still in place. Neighbors and friends were slowly starting to gather outside, trying to take advantage of the better weather to break the shell of their isolation. If you were living in Oakland, California at the time, a sunny weekend might include a trip to Lake Merritt with a blanket, a book, or a buddy. Circling that lake you would have found Nathaniel Lown, pushing a small cart, peddling his mothers’ original recipe for homemade vegan oatmeal cookies.

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Getting in the Brothy Business

Olivia Spitzer

In 2017 honing, crafting, packaging, marketing and selling bone broth was the furthest thing from Julia Baker’s mind. She was in her twenties and suffering from disruptive and painful gut issues. She spoke to her doctor and they ran a series of tests, with everything coming back frustratingly normal. Her doctor told her that she was fine, and Julia remembers thinking, “that is an insane answer. I do not feel fine.”

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