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MELLOW FARMS
Vendor: Tony Mellow
Come to the Market any Saturday during the season and you’ll find the rear right corner filled with a variety of attractive, well-priced flowers and vegetables that are grown by Tony Mellow on his family farm in Morgan Hill. Mellow’s family has been farming in this valley since the 1800s. His grandparents started the first of the family farms in Mountain View, where they grew apricots, prunes, and pears for the local canneries. “My Dad kept doing the same thing, “ says Mellow, whose father added farm land in Los Altos, Atherton, Gilroy, Sunnyvale, Alviso, Geyserville, and San Jose to grow for the canneries and prune dehydrators. Mellow’s father also started the family growing walnuts. And Mellow’s parents were also instrumental in helping set up the PAFM. “I started in 1966 growing pumpkins and miscellaneous vegetables,” says Tony. “By 1977 I had my own ranch in Morgan Hill and we went to the Garden City Farmers’ Market in San Jose when it opened. That was the first of the local Farmers’ Markets to open. The Med-fly problem caused us to start growing flowers and we continue to grow and change with the times.” Mellow started selling at the PAFM in 1981, but if the crowd around Mellow’s stand every Saturday is any indication, he has indeed continued to adapt well. Tony says that what keeps customers coming back to his stand is that “people like our prices and also the quality” of his flowers and produce. What gets Tony Mellow up early every Saturday so he can leave the ranch at 4am to make it to PAFM? “The customers are very friendly and the management is very different from other Farmers’ Markets…which are run by companies that want to make money and don’t care about their growers like Palo Alto does.” He adds that this makes for “a very pleasant environment to sell at.”
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