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Morning at the Market: Pike Place prepares for annual flower festival
On an early Saturday morning, trucks crowded the street outside of Pike Place Market. Bucket by bucket, local farmers unloaded thousands of colorful flowers. Within half an hour, the Market was filled with a wide array of flowers from the Northwest including tulips, daffodils, irises and peonies.
Every year Pike Place Market celebrates the flower farmers and booths that make the market so vibrant and colorful. Now in its 15th year, the market's Flower Festival took place over a particular warm and sunny May weekend in Seattle.
Flowers are a fixture at Pike Place Market, even in the winter when dried bouquets brighten things up. Held on Mother's Day weekend, the Flower Festival is one of the busiest for vendors who build up extra inventory for the festivities.
More than 35 vendors brought their flowers into the city from farms located in King, Snohomish, and Whatcom counties. They arrived around 5 a.m. to set up at the empty market, with only some ambitious early morning runners in sight.
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Parker Miles Blohm works closely with KNKX's News and Music teams to develop visual stories and media online. He studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri and previously worked at NPR.