In Venice, salad greens, Asian vegetables, stone fruit and muskmelons

The Venice farmers market is modest in size but rich in high-quality stands with colorful characters behind them.

Dennis Peitso of Maggie’s Farm, a pioneer organic grower of premium salad greens, including sweet, tender mache, has handed over management of the farm in Agoura Hills to his son Nate, 28, who lives a few blocks from the Venice market. Nate took off last year for Central America, intending to open up a bar on the beach, but an encounter with the muzzle of a bandit’s gun convinced him to rejoin the family business. Businesses, actually, since he also works at the much larger Kenter Canyon Farms for his mother, Andrea Crawford, Dennis’s ex-wife.

Five family members tend the stand for Kao Youa Moua of Selma, a Hmong grower of Asian vegetables, including scorchingly hot Thai peppers, lemon grass, long beans and Shanghai bok choy.

There must be something in the water up in the San Joaquin Valley that drives schoolteachers to grow organic stone fruit to sell at Southern California farmers markets: Consider Truman Kennedy, Gene Etheridge and now Robert Todd of Rancho Padre, from Exeter, who takes a defiantly noncommercial approach to farming. He grows a few trees each of dozens of varieties and brings them to market drippingly ripe. His Santa Rosa plums finished last week, but he will continue to have a most unusual and delicious juice made from them, as well as Casselman plums, a later variety descended from Santa Rosa.

Drawing from Lucerne Valley, in the high desert, the Weiser Family Farms stand is a riot of melons, including round, striped Cavaillon-type muskmelons, with dense, sweet, aromatic orange flesh. Kinny Jung, the vendor, is an antique car collector, an amateur comedian and a pro at assessing melon maturity. Ask for a specimen that will be ripe tomorrow afternoon, and he’ll respond, only half in jest, “What time tomorrow afternoon?”

Bob Polito has been bringing excellent Valencia oranges from Valley Center to this market for so long that it’s easy to take him for granted. But water cutbacks have forced him to chop down 10 of his 50 acres of Valencias, and he was dismayed to learn that just last week, scientists in Yucatan discovered tiny insects called Asian citrus psyllids infected with greening -- the first time this bacterial disease, which threatens to devastate California citrus plantings if it arrives here, has been identified in Mexico. The future looks so problematic that Polito is seriously considering investing in a stone fruit orchard in the San Joaquin Valley.

Venice farmers market, Venice Boulevard at Venice Way, Fridays 7 to 11 a.m.

Tips of the week: Kotata blackberries look unremarkable but have rich fruity flavor derived from their boysenberry and loganberry ancestors. Introduced in 1984, they’re widely grown in Oregon, but hard to find here, because they’re too tender for shipping; Doug Powell of Redlands sells them at the Hollywood and Beverly Hills markets.

Fitz Kelly, a stalwart of the Santa Monica Wednesday market, calls the bright gold nectarine he found in a neighbor’s orchard “Gladiator,” but it’s really just an old-fashioned variety of unknown name. No matter, it’s about the most delicious stone fruit in the markets, with high sugar and acidity, and an intense semi-wild tang like nectarines used to have before breeders got “better ideas.”