The Third Ward Farmers Market Opened Saturday - in Costume, With $850 in Groceries on the Table

HOUSTON - Most farmers markets open quietly. The Third Ward Farmers Market opened in costume. Saturday was the market's very first market day - 'Third Ward, it's our very first market day, and it happens to fall on Halloween. So we're throwing a party,' the organizers at Rooted Futures wrote in the event listing - and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 4435 Old Spanish Trail, the party doubled as a grocery run.

The centerpiece was a family costume contest judged at the main stage, with grocery prizes scaled like a podium: $500 in groceries for first place, $250 for second and $100 for third, $850 in all. Matching costumes, themed costumes and, in the listing's words, homemade costumes held together with duct tape and love all counted. Around the contest, the day ran on hay rides, trick-or-treating with the farmers and vendors, live music, family games, Halloween drinks and seasonal treats.

Underneath the costumes, the market is built to be a working food source for the neighborhood. Admission and parking were free, and shoppers using SNAP/EBT could swipe a Lone Star card at the Market Information Booth for tokens to spend with participating food vendors, with staff on hand to explain dollar-for-dollar produce matching programs such as Double Up Food Bucks - the mechanism that turns a benefits dollar into two dollars of fresh produce.

A first market day is a beginning, not a verdict, and the listing makes no attendance claims. What it establishes is the shape of the thing: a weekly-style neighborhood market planted in the Third Ward, opening on the most neighborly day of the fall calendar, and paying its first costume winners in the most practical prize a farmers market can offer - groceries.