Lakeland's Local-Food Week Used to Start on Saturday. Now It Starts Wednesday on Cleveland Heights.

Where do you buy a loaf of local sourdough in Lakeland on a Wednesday afternoon?

For years the honest answer was that you waited. The Lakeland Downtown Farmers Curb Market runs every Saturday on N. Kentucky Avenue between Lemon Street and Oak Street, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. from September through May. It shuts down every August. It's a great market with a narrow window. If you missed Saturday morning, the next chance was a week away.

That changed in June. The Makers Market & Farmacy opened at 4604 Cleveland Heights Blvd., and it's open Wednesday through Sunday. For folks on the south side of town, buying local now fits into a weekday errand.

A Market With a Roof and Regular Hours

The store's posted hours set the whole thing apart from a weekend market. According to its website, the Makers Market is open:

• Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

There are no Monday or Tuesday hours listed.

Put that next to the downtown schedule and the two cover the week without much overlap.

Saturday is the only day both are open, and even then they're staggered. Downtown opens two hours before the Cleveland Heights store and closes three hours earlier. Somebody who hits Kentucky Avenue at 8 can be on the south side well before the Makers Market closes at 5.

Why It Works Like a Farmers Market

The Makers Market & Farmacy isn't a grocery store with a local-products aisle. Owners Phil and Cheryl Thall set it up so independent businesses rent their own spaces inside, and LkldNow reported in August that the store itself doesn't buy wholesale products or act as an anchor business.

"Each business rents their space, and then that's their space," Cheryl Thall told LkldNow. "It's 100% their business. They just pay the fees to participate in the store."

Each vendor sets its own prices, manages its own inventory and decorates its own display. That's the same deal you get under a tent downtown, minus the tent and the 2 p.m. cutoff. The Thalls run Garden Fairies Farm, and in that LkldNow piece Cheryl said the farm gets no special treatment: "Our farm behaves and is treated like every other business in here."

The owners told LkldNow the whole idea was to make locally produced goods available throughout the week rather than only during market hours.

The August Gap That Filled the Store

The downtown market's yearly break turned out to matter a great deal to this store. More than 60 vendors had committed before opening day, after the Thalls visited farmers markets to pitch the idea. Then, according to LkldNow, the Curb Market's seasonal closure in August set off another wave of vendor applications.

Those applications make sense. A vendor with no Saturday market for a month still has bread to bake and soap to sell. Two months after opening, the store had more than 80 vendors, and Cheryl Thall counted 82 independent, locally owned businesses renting space. That's the August count.

Demand changed how the owners pick vendors. They stopped taking every qualified applicant and started building a balanced mix, limiting duplicate product categories so shoppers find more variety under one roof. For a shopper, that means you're less likely to walk past five honey stands and more likely to leave with a full bag.

Downtown is still the bigger crowd. The Curb Market's own page puts a typical Saturday at about 125 to 150 vendors. The two markets do different jobs: downtown is the Saturday-morning outing, and the Cleveland Heights store is the Thursday stop for something you ran out of.

Who's on the Shelves

The store's vendor directory lists who's renting space. It leans heavily toward food and toward goods that make good gifts.

Bread, sweets and prepared food

• Krust & Krumbs, sourdough breads and pastries
• Cheesy Dreams, handcrafted cheese breads
• Ellie's Microbakery, Greek delicacies and American favorites
• Sweet Obsessionz, handcrafted desserts
• Designed for a Purpose, cupcakes
• Feasts of Persia, Mediterranean-fusion foods including flavored hummus
• San Felipe Spice Trading, spices
• Healing Glow Juices, fresh juice blends

Bath, body and home

• Waters Edge Apothecary, herbal tinctures, salves and teas
• Joyful Essentials, bath-and-body products
• Sudz Cauldron, haircare
• Rielme Soaps, small-batch soaps
• Garden Fairies Farm, the Thalls' family-owned nursery

Gifts and reading

• The Red Swan Shop, paper goods and accessories
• Caroline's Corner, wire-wrapped crystal and gemstone pendants and seed-bead earrings
• No Covers, new and used books, including titles by local and regional authors

The store's site also lists farm produce, meat, eggs, dairy, plants and pantry items among its categories. Garden Fairies Farm supplies many of the plants, fresh herbs, locally sourced produce and eggs.

What Florida Grows Between Thanksgiving and Christmas

Produce is where the season matters most. Back in August, the owners told LkldNow that summer produce came from regional farms around the Southeast until local growers started harvesting in the fall. We're in that fall stretch now.

The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services publishes a monthly list of what's in season. The November list includes strawberries, tomatoes, sweet corn, snap beans, squash, eggplant, bell peppers, cucumbers, radishes, avocados, guava, carambola, passion fruit, mushrooms and peanuts, plus oranges, grapefruit and tangerines.

The December list keeps most of those and adds the cool-weather crops: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, celery and lettuce. Peanuts drop off.

So the holiday table in Polk County runs on Florida strawberries and citrus while most of the country is down to stored apples. And by Christmas week, the salad greens can come from Florida too.

Saturday, Nov. 28, Runs on Both Ends of Town

The Saturday after Thanksgiving is the one day this fall when both markets line up with a bigger downtown event. The Downtown Lakeland November calendar lists Small Business Saturday all day on Nov. 28, the Curb Market from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. as usual, and a Holiday Craft Bazaar in Munn Park from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Munn Park bazaar page promises more than 45 local makers and Santa photos from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The downtown authority runs those events. They're not Makers Market events. Still, the timing works if you want to do both. Downtown opens at 8, the bazaar runs until 3, and the Cleveland Heights store keeps its regular Saturday hours of 10 to 5. Kentucky Avenue in the morning and Cleveland Heights in the afternoon makes a full day of small-business shopping.

One more date for December: Downtown Lakeland lists a Holiday Night Market on Saturday, Dec. 12, from 5 to 9 p.m. That one opens at 5, the same hour the Cleveland Heights store closes on Saturdays, so you could shop the south side in the afternoon and head downtown for the evening.

If you're the one in the family who always runs out of bread on a Wednesday, the south side has you covered now. And if all this market-hopping has you curious what your own place near Cleveland Heights Boulevard is worth these days, Brian Stephens can help. Get your instant home valuation, and let's talk about it over a Krust & Krumbs loaf sometime.