This time of year, if you ask farmer Jeannine Kalvaitis what was good at her Streeterville market stall, she will tell you it’s all fresh-picked and delicious. But, if pressed, she’ll admit it’s the candy onions, the watermelon and the tomatoes that are best this week.

“If I haven’t got a thousand compliments on our tomatoes, I haven’t gotten any,” said Kalvaitis, of Scheeringa farms.

That the northeast Indiana family farm has vine-ripened tomatoes and perfectly toned watermelon to bring into Chicago’s city and neighborhood markets this year is a minor miracle. The same heavy spring rains that kept corn and bean farmers out of fields also stopped food growers from putting tractors in their fields.

“Everything but the sweet corn was grown in raised beds this year,” Kalvaitis said.

Joined by her sister, Janielle Scheeringa, at the Streeterville market for 20 years, Kalvaitis sells each year’s crop, grown on the family’s 150-acre farm, in a few markets throughout the city each week.

As the shadows grow and the season changes to equal parts daylight and dark, the offerings at markets in Daley Plaza, Printers Row and over at UIC increase in volume and variety.

Orchardist Chad Nichols has one solution to keep his family farm’s apple offerings ripe and ready in bins at Streeterville and 14 other markets across the city. Nichols’ orchard in Marengo is home to 230 established varieties of apples that ripen for market in intervals until the season ends.

In the next few weeks, the apple to watch for is the Cox Orange Pippin, Nichols said Tuesday as he bounced around, feeding people slices of an apple called a “20-ounce” for very obvious reasons.

“It’s heirloom ugly, but has a very unique flavor,” Nichols said

The decades-old farmers’ market movement across the city provides residents an alternative to factory-farm produce and a level of connection and expectation to the natural cycle of seasons, said Lisa Lee, director of the Jane Adams Hull House Museum.

Lee has taken a slightly different direction with the first year of the Hull House market, which hosts few vendors in comparison to the larger ones across the city. But still, the season’s tomatoes, organic salsa, apples, cucumbers and zucchini are all there for students and staff.

The Hull House market was planned to be small from the beginning, because small is where it’s at, she said. In keeping with the Hull House mission of improving conditions for underserved people, Lee would like to see smaller markets in more locations rather than the some of larger ones like Green City Market in Lincoln Park and the long-running Daley Plaza market.

Lee said her market is the only one on the Near West Side of the city, and that should change. From a social-service perspective, a large market with multiple vendors is not necessary.

“The people on campus are committed to it,” Lee said.

Ryan Peidt, from Peidt Farms in southwest Michigan, sells about 30 bushels of apples, among other items, each week at four markets in and around the city. Like the natural cycle of growing season the small market, situated in a UIC parking lot, will grow to the right size, he said.

The Hull House market has seen an uptick of patrons since classes resumed in late August. And for the next several weeks they’ll have their pick of the harvest from farmers’ fields.

“Pumpkins and gourds are next,” Peidt said.

Contact: gskinner@chicagojournal.com