Why we exist
Buy close.
Eat close.
Live local.
Farms & Makers exists for one reason: to make it easy to live locally in the Wenatchee Valley. To buy your food, your gifts and your everyday things from the people who grow and make them, a few miles from home.
It's all here.
It's hard to find.
Wenatchee calls itself the Apple Capital of the World, and the whole valley earns it. Cherries in June. Apricots and peaches through the summer. Apples and pears all fall. Between the Columbia and the Cascades there are fruit stands, farms, beekeepers, bakers, brewers, potters, soap makers, woodworkers and weavers.
But a lot of what's grown here gets packed and shipped somewhere else. The soap maker down the road and the baker two towns over are easy to miss unless you already know them. Their best customers often find them by luck: a sign on Highway 2, a table at the market, a friend who says “you have to try this.”
We think that should be easier. So we're putting the valley in one place: its stands, farms and makers, what's in season right now, and how to find them. Not to replace the fruit stand or the market. To send more people to them.
Small habits. Big valley.
Pick one thing you buy every week and get it from someone you can name: eggs, bread, coffee, honey.
In season, skip the store aisle and drive to the fruit stand. It's ten minutes and the apples were on the tree yesterday.
Birthdays, thank-yous, holidays. Soap, pottery, a box of pears. Gifts with a name and a town on them.
Leave them a review on Google. Tell a neighbor. A good word is how a small maker gets their next customer.
Every dollar spent with a local grower or maker stays closer to home. It keeps the orchard in the family, the bakery's lights on, and the valley a place where people make things.
How we run this
No listing fees. Growers and makers don't pay to be found.
Nobody can pay to be listed first. The guide is about what's made here, not who paid.
Everything listed is grown, made or brewed in north central Washington by the business itself.
Every listing names the business and the town. They're the reason this exists.
88 places.
9 towns.
19 kinds of goods.
And growing.