Ask someone who has never lived here what happens at Fir Street Park on a Sunday and you will get the postcard answer: tents, produce, maybe a band. That description is not wrong. It is just missing the part that explains why the market looks the way it does, why it closes on two Sundays a year that have nothing to do with weather or vendor turnout, and why a table selling quail eggs shares a lawn with a booth teaching kids to spend five dollars on their own vegetables.
The market at Fir Street Park is not a chamber of commerce shopping event with a farm theme bolted on. It is run by Seed to Table, a nonprofit whose mission centers on food access, and that single fact shapes almost everything else about how the Sunday market operates. Once you see it that way, the closures, the programming, and even the vendor mix stop looking like charming extras and start looking like a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Who Actually Runs the Market
A lot of small-town farmers markets exist to pull foot traffic into a business district, and there is nothing wrong with that model. Sisters took a different path. The market is managed by Seed to Table, a local nonprofit, which means the person deciding what happens on that lawn each Sunday is thinking about nutrition access and community health first, retail traffic second. That is not a guess based on branding. It shows up directly in what the market actually offers.
This year the market runs every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., June 7 through October 25, at Fir Street Park, the corner lot at Fir and Main that locals will tell you sits just behind the dinosaur statue on Main Avenue. More than 45 vendors set up weekly, and the park itself carries the market's fingerprints in its permanent features: a stage built for the market's music lineup, and a splash pad that keeps kids occupied while parents work through the vendor rows. When the lawn fills up or the weather turns, the market spills into an indoor space called The Hub on East Main Avenue, a detail that only matters once you have been caught at the market during a surprise rain shower.
The Programs a Tourist Guide Would Skip
Here is where the nonprofit structure stops being trivia and starts being useful. Sisters Farmers Market accepts SNAP benefits and matches them with Double Up Food Bucks, doubling a shopper's purchasing power on fresh produce, with more than 20 vendors participating in a given week. This summer the market also launched VeggieRX, a produce prescription program built with the High Desert Food and Farm Alliance, where medical providers refer patients dealing with food insecurity or diet-related health needs, and the program opened with free cooking demonstrations from Roots at Heart Nutrition.
There is also a standing kids' program called the Power of Produce Club, open free to anyone 14 and under, that pairs a weekly educational activity with five dollars to spend on fruits and vegetables at the market. In late June, the market handed a booth over entirely to kids ages 7 to 17 running their own small businesses for the day.
None of this is the kind of detail that shows up in a visitor's guide, because none of it is aimed at visitors. It is aimed at the town itself, and it is the clearest evidence that the market functions less like a Sunday retail event and more like a piece of community infrastructure that happens to sell tomatoes.
What's New on the Vendor List This Year
The commercial side of the market has not been standing still either. According to reporting from the Bend-based news outlet The Source, the 2026 season brought in several new vendors that widen what you will find at the tables beyond the usual produce and baked goods:
- Windy Acres Dairy, bringing cheese to the lineup
- Marquam Hill Berries
- REINA, serving Mexican food
- Lost Grace Farm, selling quail meat and eggs
That mix, protein and dairy specialists joining a market that already leans heavily on produce growers, tracks with how the market's director has described its purpose. Willa Bauman, who directs Sisters Farmers Market, has said the market functions as a space to celebrate the food and creativity of the region, not just a place to restock the pantry. Last year the market drew more than 22,000 people across its season, a number that only makes sense once you register how many different reasons people have to show up: the produce, the prescription program, the kids' club, the new cheese vendor, the music.
Why the Market Skips Two Sundays You'd Expect It to Run
If you are the kind of person who plans a Sunday around the market, mark this down: the market is closed on September 27 and October 11 this year, both listed plainly as closures for citywide events. That is not a scheduling accident. September 27 falls on the final day of Sisters Folk Festival weekend, which runs Friday through Sunday in late September and pulls performances across seven stages around downtown. October 11 is the second day of this year's Sisters Harvest Faire, the annual craft and art fair that takes over Main Avenue on the second weekend of October.
The market does not compete with those weekends. It steps aside for them. That says something worth knowing if you are new to town or just tired of guessing: Sisters treats its calendar of signature events as more important than a running weekly institution, even one as well attended as the Sunday market. If you are building a fall Sunday around fresh produce and live music at Fir Street Park, check the date against the festival calendar first.
The Rest of the Week Fills In Around It
The market is the anchor, but it is not the whole week. Wednesdays through the summer bring Wagon Wednesdays, horse-drawn wagon rides through downtown run by North Pine Carriage Company using Belgian draft horses, with a day pass covering unlimited hop-on, hop-off rides between designated Stage Stops around town, including a stop at C&C Nursery. It runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and it is built as much for people who already live here as for anyone passing through.
Wednesday evenings belong to a different crowd entirely. Sisters Saloon & Ranch Grill, housed in the restored 1912 Hotel Sisters building on Cascade Avenue, has run a weekly no-limit Texas Hold'em tournament upstairs since 2010. Players sign up in a ten-minute window between 5:15 and 5:25 p.m., a detail regulars know and newcomers usually learn the hard way.
Put those three threads together, the Sunday market, the Wednesday wagon rides, the Wednesday night poker tables, and you get a picture of Sisters that is less about any single attraction and more about a town that has built small, recurring rituals into its week and let them accumulate meaning over time. The market just happens to be the one doing the most quiet work.
If you are weighing what it actually feels like to live near a town that runs this way, that is exactly the kind of texture worth knowing before you make a decision about where to put down roots in Central Oregon. If Sisters is on your list and you want a conversation grounded in what daily life here actually looks like, not just listing sheets, Marge Gatien is happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.
