Vegetarian Solution : The Only Farmer at Farmer’s Market : Produce: A true merchant-farmer, Charlie Lopez is equally adept at shucking corn and tending celebrity customers.

If you think about the name at all, you need a sense of humor to call the complex at Third Street and Fairfax Avenue the Farmer’s Market.

Certainly, there is good food to be had at several of its 75 to 80 stalls. And the historic open-air market is a wonderful place to pass a weekend morning among a pride of screenwriters with a cup of coffee, a doughnut and a newspaper.

But unless some crazed biogeneticist has come up with a way to grow souvenir plates and “All I Got Was This Lousy . . . “ T-shirts, the name is not to be taken seriously.

In fact, at a time when the farmers’ market movement is growing by leaps and bounds both nationally and locally (there are 26 such weekly gatherings in Los Angeles County), there is only one true farmer at the Farmer’s Market. His name is Charlie Lopez and, surrounded by the memorabilia, the post cards and the beach towels, he sells tomatoes, corn, cucumber, green beans, cantaloupe and pumpkins from the 120 acres his family farms near Sepulveda Dam. (The other produce stands in the market get their stock from outside suppliers.)

A tall, hearty man with a thick thatch of silver hair, Lopez is a true merchant-farmer, equally adept at shucking corn and customers and unafraid to claim for his produce the kind of reknown normally reserved for certain of the celebrities who occasionally happen by.

One of 14 children in a family that emigrated from Michoacan, Mexico, in 1927, Lopez is the son of a musician and farm laborer, who, for a time, worked for a Japanese farmer. When the farmer was interned at the beginning of World War II, he asked the elder Lopez to take over his leased acreage in the area that is now Marina del Rey. Lopez’s father did, sending half the proceeds to the camp. The next year, skyrocketing celery prices enabled the family to buy the 18 acres of land outright from its owner.

For many years, Charlie Lopez worked at the family fruit and vegetable stand--until a disagreement over his mother’s will resulted in a nasty split. He then joined his cousins, the Tapia brothers, at their farm near the corner of Havenhurst Drive and Burbank Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. Three years ago, he came to the Farmer’s Market.

“John Gostovich, who used to manage the Farmer’s Market, used to buy corn from the Tapias, so he knew about me,” Lopez says. “He’d asked me two or three times whether I was interested in coming to the Market. At that time, my mother was still alive and I couldn’t leave her.

“But after she died, I was looking for something else, so I called him up and asked him if anything was available. He called me back an hour later and told me I had a space.”

The match has worked well, and Market regulars have come to look forward to Lopez’s ultra-sweet Silver Queen white corn and flavorful Golden Jubilee and Golden Queen yellow corn, his Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder string beans, his Big Boy and Beefsteak tomatoes and his zucchini, summer and sunburst squash.

“Little by little, people are coming back to the Market,” Lopez says. “At one time, I think, they were going to the Irvine Ranch Market, but now they’re starting to come back here.

“There are great people here all the time. When I was at the stand, we were only open from June to September and then we’d close it down. Here, we’re year-round.”

Of course, competing with major grocery store chains is not something that comes naturally to a local farmer. It would be impossible for Lopez to grow all the carrots, celery and lettuce that his customers want, so he gets a lot of his produce from outside suppliers, just like the chains and the other produce stands in the market. But as much as possible, he buys from other small farmers he knows.

So the strawberries come from Long Beach and Oxnard, the figs from Sylmar, the dates from Indio, the persimmons from San Marcos and the Roma tomatoes from the San Fernando Valley.

“People are really starting to watch for different things,” Lopez says. “They’ve been asking me about figs since the start of summer. I got only about 20 pounds from the first crop and as soon as I put them out, some Italian fellow from New York walked in and bought the whole thing.”

Which proves that there is at least one visitor to the Farmer’s Market who really knows how to shop for souvenirs.