Students and community members have found somewhere aside from grocery stores to shop for fresh produce and other odds and ends.

Market at the Square, also known as the Urbana farmers’ market, provides a place for vendors across the state to sell their often homemade or homegrown products. The market is open every Saturday from May 12th through Nov. 10th from 7 a.m. to noon, in the southeast parking lot of Lincoln Square in downtown Urbana.

Even on a cool Saturday morning threatened by showers, vendors are kept busy with customers shopping around.

“It’s very much a community event and people come out,” said Mindi Green, senior in LAS. “You can see a lot of the local companies and a lot of the stuff that’s grown here, which is nice.”

This was Green’s first time at the farmers’ market; she said she had heard of it before but had never been because this is her first summer in Champaign.

In addition to produce, vendors sell meat, flowers, jewelry, kettle corn, wood carvings and much more. According to the city of Urbana’s Web site, there are more than 140 registered vendors, with an average of 75 setting up every Saturday.

Carol Toler of Urbana has been selling kettle corn at the farmers’ market for six years. Her husband and children help manage the booth, which also sells walking sticks and outdoor furniture. Her husband makes the kettle corn in the back of the booth while people are buying.

“You mix it in that big kettle there. Put the corn oil in, the sugar and the popcorn,” Toler said. “You pop it and add salt afterwards, we stir it and try to get most of the seeds out, and then we bag it.”

Toler said you can’t bag the corn while it is too hot or it will rip the bag.

“Today is a good day to let it cool,” she said.

Toler ran the only booth selling kettle corn on Saturday, and there was no shortage of customers.

“People tell us they get out of their car at the parking lot, and they can smell it way over there … I said ‘Well, our marketing strategy is working,'” she said.

Not all vendors have been selling their products for as long a period of time. This was Kristi Emilsson’s second week at the farmers’ market. A Champaign-Urbana native, Emilsson crafts and sells pottery.

“My junior year I decided that I wanted to do something aside from lots of essays, and I decided to take a pottery class,” she said. “The professor (at Millikin University) was wonderful, and I really got into it. By the time that I graduated, I decided I was giving up my major of theater and I wanted to pursue this.”

In her first two weeks, she has sold a substantial amount. She said last week she sold about two-thirds of what she brought and this week about one-third. She attributed the decrease in sales to the weather as well as the Taste of Champaign-Urbana going on at the same time. The farmers’ market sales have already become an integral part of her life.

“I recently walked out of my retail job because I got fed up with it, so that is part of why it is very important to me to be here every week because this is my sole income for the rest of the summer,” Emilsson said.

While there is a wide variety of products available at the farmers’ market, produce is the most prevalent, with several booths across the market. First Fruits Produce Company is in its ninth year selling at the market, and carries cauliflower, salad greens and fresh and frozen chicken.

“Every year it’s grown as far as what we grow, as far as the amount that we grow and the customers that we’ve had,” said Stacy Asbill of Mahomet. “We have a lot of regular customers who come every week.”

First Fruits also sells at First Market in Mahomet every Wednesday, as well as supplying produce to a store in Mahomet.

“We do a lot of the regular produce that you see, but we do a lot of specialty too,” Asbill said. “When people come to us and ask us if we would be willing to try something new, we go for it. We try to do just about everything and whatever is new.”

On the sweeter side, Audra Martin of Urbana makes old English toffee in milk and dark chocolate varieties.

“It’s my mother-in-law’s recipe … I brought it to a parent-teacher conference at my son’s school and the teachers went nuts over it, and so I started selling it to teachers during the holidays,” Martin said. “I did that for a couple of seasons and I started out at the farmers’ market after that and it’s been full time since then.”

She said she usually has a couple castle towers for the stand, but did not bring them out this Saturday because of the weather.

“I love all things fairy-tale, so I’m kind of going with the fairy-tale theme,” Martin said. “We’ve got big castle towers that stand in front of the booth, that kind of goes with the old English toffee.”