By Eric Stock

NORMAL – It appears Bloomington-Normal isn’t big enough for two farmers markets.

Normal has discontinued its ‘trailside’ market which the town had hoped would bring more shoppers to Uptown.

Uptown manager Joe Tulley said it was tough to compete with Bloomington’s more established market on Saturdays. Those vendors weren’t coming back to sell the produce on Tuesdays too.

“We generally tried to be pretty liberal in accepting vendors because we wanted to create the mass that would draw a lot of people to the market,” Tulley said. “We were never able to get the type of mix that we wanted or the numbers we wanted.”

Tulley said the market ended up with a lot of baked goods and craft sellers instead. He said moving the market to another day of the week or another time wouldn’t have likely brought more people.

“We didn’t feel like shifting the time an hour or two was going to double or triple the attendance, which is what we would need long term to make it they type of event we’d like to pour a lot of resources into,” Tulley said.

The market was ultimately unable to compete with the larger, more established market in downtown Bloomington each on Saturday mornings from May through November.

“That’s not necessarily to downgrade ours, it’s just there’s is spectacular,” Tulley said. “If the need is being met somewhere, maybe we didn’t need to duplicate it across town midweek.”

Eric Stock can be reached at [email protected].