Drive-up fruit and vegetable stands sprout like weeds at this time of year along Ventura County's highways and byways. Some are elaborate, year-round retail establishments in permanent buildings; others are ephemeral, perhaps no more than a table and sunshade next to a van or pickup truck parked on the shoulder. But they're eye-grabbing and colorful, drawing business from local residents as well as tourists. Some people stop to shop; others merely want to take pictures.

Roadside produce stands seem to me a form of folk art, blending the aesthetic qualities of fruits and vegetables with the creative products of human imagination in ways that are sometimes quirky or surprising, occasionally funny and always picturesque. Artfully arranged fruit, professionally manufactured billboards, irregular bits of cardboard bearing hand-scrawled price lists -- regardless of their level of sophistication, they're a modern-day version of one of the oldest forms of commercial food distribution: the village market days that for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years have drawn farmers to town to display and sell the products of their fields.

As part of this project, I'm assembling a photographic scrapbook of Ventura county's roadside produce stands, which I eventually will post online. I need your help to make sure I don't miss any.

I can easily find the stands along the major arteries running through Ventura County's growing regions -- Highways 126, 33, 150 and 118, and the major roads crossing the Oxnard Plain. But I don't want to miss the ones along side streets or on more remote rural lanes that I don't generally travel. So if you know of a stand in your neighborhood or one that you pass each day on your way to work -- or even if you operate a stand and just want to make sure I don't overlook you -- please e-mail me the location. Be as precise as possible, and let me know whether the stand is open daily or just on weekends. Thanks.