Growers eager to sell their bounty find city folks wanting to stock up at San Pedro Farmer’s Market.

Each Thursday morning, Carletta Thorsell and Doris Shipman meet in downtown San Pedro, where they share casual conversation and conduct business across a table that is blanketed with the bounty of California’s fertile soil.

“It’s marvelous,” declares Shipman, who buys Italian parsley from Thorsell. “The fruit and vegetables are fresher here. They’re right from the farm.”

And so they are, at the San Pedro Farmer’s Market.

A weekly affair on 3rd Street, the market is a wash of colors, smells and sounds--the shouting of questions (“How much for that cauliflower?”), the clinking of coins as they change hands from city slicker to rural farmer, the rustle of plastic bags filled with plump red tomatoes or sweet yellow corn.

It is a place an artist might relish. The crinkles etched into the farmers’ faces, the smooth and rough textures of the fruit and vegetables, the slant of the sunlight as it hits the metal scales--all might serve as fine material for a painting or a photograph.

Artistic enlightenment, however, is not the goal of the San Pedro Farmer’s Market.

The goal, says manager Dale Whitney, is far more plain and practical: to bring good, healthy produce at reasonable prices to residents of San Pedro, particularly its low-income and elderly population, while providing small family farmers with a place to make enough profit to stay in business.

The market, which has been operating in San Pedro since 1985, is associated with two others, both in Long Beach. The three do business under the umbrella name of Harbor Area Farmers Markets, and are sponsored jointly by the First Congregational Church in Long Beach and the South Coast Ecumenical Council.

“Many of these (farmers) are (from) very small-time farms,” says Nan Nutt, administrator at the First Congregational Church. “They’re not your big agribusiness and they need this sort of outlet in order to keep going. They don’t have enough to furnish Von’s supermarket, and so they’re willing to drive all night to be here to sell their produce.”

Indeed, farmers come from as far north as Visalia and as far south as the Mexican border to sell their goods in San Pedro. “It’s a lot of driving,” says Visalia farmer Danny Pritchett, who sells plums, nectarines, apples, apricots, lemons and anything else, he says, that grows on a tree.

Pritchett says he sells between $400 and $600 of produce each Thursday at the San Pedro market. Like many small farmers who find it more lucrative to sell directly to consumers than to packing houses or supermarkets, Pritchett makes the rounds of Southern California’s farmer’s markets; San Pedro is one of five markets he frequents each week.

Produce at the San Pedro market ranges from the standard to the exotic. It is as easy to find guava, persimmon and pink lentils as it is to find apples, grapefruit and oranges.

For instance Thorsell, who works for Top Veg Farms in nearby Carson, offers Chinese long beans, Japanese cucumbers and bitter melon--which doesn’t look like melon at all, but more closely resembles a pale green zucchini with warts. (Bitter melon, Thorsell volunteers, is usually stir-fried with tomatoes or onions and is believed to have medicinal properties.)

Whitney, a Presbyterian minister who recently gave up his full-time post at a Long Beach church to manage the harbor area markets, says the key to a successful farmer’s market is location: The market ought to be on the border between an affluent community, where residents might spend more for unusual fruits and vegetables like those Thorsell sells, and a poor one, where residents need the staples at affordable prices.

In San Pedro, the 3rd Street location fits that bill. The market is near the commercial core and around the corner from the headquarters of the Los Angeles Harbor Department, but across the street from Rancho San Pedro, a public housing project.

It attracts residents like Leslie Sharp, who says she comes “when my car happens to be working or when I can get a ride” and non-residents like Marla Silverman, who works as a real estate officer at the Harbor Department and lives in West Los Angeles.

“They seem to taste a little bit fresher, so I do try to buy all my fruits and vegetables there,” said Silverman, who favors Japanese plums and the vast selection of sprouts sold by a vendor who runs a greenhouse in Venice Beach.

Said Alfred Fischer, a San Pedro resident who teaches geology at the University of Southern California: “I would much rather shop in a market like this than a supermarket. . . . You’re closer to the soil this way.”