Happy Gardens Nursery’s Todd Symes has brought a colorful bounty of produce from his farm, located just south of Oregon City, exclusively to Tigard, for a couple of decades.
Why Tigard?
“When I first started selling, Tigard was the only place available. I started selling at the Tigard Farmers Market about 20 years ago and broke off to the Bull Mountain Farmers Market about ten years later. What’s kept me here are the people. A lot of them have really become family,” said Symes.
“The customers are fantastic. I just love 99% of the customers. It’s incredible.
Happy Gardens offers a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, organic vegetable starts, mushrooms and even eggs.
“I used to not care about eggs. We used to buy store eggs. My wife was recuperating from an automobile accident and asked me, ‘Why don’t we get some chickens,’ So I bought her six chickens. After we cooked the first egg that was produced, I was like, ‘Ah, this is what an egg tastes like!’”
Today, Symes and his wife raise a flock of about 300 chickens, geese, and ducks.
All of the produce from Happy Gardens are grown organically. His most popular items are tomatoes, with different varieties coming in from mid-July through August, and the Romano Beans. This sweet and juicy Italian heirloom variety has been popular with his customers.
“It’s a flat bean that grows about nine inches long, an inch wide.”
Symes also brings in a variety of other fruits and vegetables that he doesn’t grow from other local farmers to keep his customers happy. A few items, like the watermelons, come from farms in California.
“We’re the kind of market that wants to have what the customer wants”
Happy Gardens Nursery is at the Bull Mountain Farmers Market every Saturday & Sunday from 9 am to 2 pm.
