RIPON — Lisa Van Groningen just gets to hang out these days at the Ripon Farmers Market.

After taking a few years off from peddling the family’s farm fresh produce – everything from watermelons to sweet corn – every week, she’s now back in a supervisory role on Thursday afternoons.

So who’s doing all of the heavy lifting? It’s the kids of the family. They are the fourth-generation of the Van Groningen clan who will one day be at the helm of the longtime Manteca agricultural enterprise. They do everything from the manual labor involved in setting up to taking the money and making change for the customers.

“It’s really a great job for the kids, and our family has a lot of kids,” Van Groningen said with a laugh. “It teaches them everything that goes into this, and it gets them involved. They have to learn customer service and how to talk to the customers, how to get their change and how to get everything ready. They seem to enjoy it, and it’s kind of nice just to sit back and watch.”

The customers didn’t seem to mind either.

With the hot summer sun beating down on the black asphalt parking lot, the free slices of watermelon that the Van Groningen booth offered seemed like a blessing from above. Nearly everybody walking through the market had a piece in their hand, and more than a few ended up with a melon of their own after a taste of one of the family’s staples.

And just getting the product out to the consumer this season was more of a chore than normal.

Late spring rain pushed back the harvest date for the majority of their products, and they weren’t ready to set up at the Ripon market until after Fourth of July weekend. Since then they’ve been making up for lost time by promoting the true family nature of their business and relishing in the quaint nature of Ripon’s market.

According to Van Groningen, it’s a good, small market for the kids to cut their teeth on before adding a larger stop to their schedule sometime in the future.

“I’ve always liked this because of the friendly atmosphere and the real sense of community that you get here,” she said. “And of course you see a lot of friendly and familiar faces.

“You get a chance to talk a lot more with people now that the moms are doing the watching and the kids are working.”

Keeping it local is also a chance for South County residents to get the first crack at produce so renowned that it will eventually make its way across the globe. A lot of the products that Van Groningen and Sons grow are shipped internationally – making the freshly picked offerings presented at the farmers market a slight departure from the normal course of business for such a large scale agricultural operation.

But it’s something that Lisa Van Groningen says she has always enjoyed doing and is glad that she’s once again back at a weekly summer market where people come out to meet the growers and farmers who deliver what they harvest each and every week.

“Getting out and talking to the people is what makes these so much fun,” she said. “These are the people that buy our products, so to have the kids be able to meet them and see this part of the operation is really great.”