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Stephen HumphreyStephen Humphrey is a freelance writer and journalist who has lived in Toronto since 1994...
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bluffs, farmer's market (2), Guild (2), local food, Scarborough (5)An older man leaving a Bank of Montreal answers he’s not going to the farmer’s market just steps away from his branch.
“Too expensive,” he says. “They say it’s because it’s fresh,” he adds sceptically.
A stretch of grass next facing Scarborough’s Guildwood Parkway, is populated with white tent-tops and tables spread with vegetables, fish, free-range chickens and home-made wing sauces.
Two young girls with violins play Mozart divertimentos when another duo is not quietly strumming guitars.
It must be a farmer’s market.
The producers are the sellers, which makes them chattier and much less stunned-looking than grocery clerks. The food is fresh, perhaps even picked that day.
The prices are noticeably higher than the No Frills a short, noisy drive away. Still, this is the first year out of several that market organizer Gail Ross recalls buyers putting price before home-grown goodness.
“I don’t know if it’s because of all of the talk about recession, recession, recession,” she says. “Typically markets are not driven by cost. That’s not a deciding factor. Freshness is.”
Ross is an easy talker, and doesn’t seem to mind explaining pricing factors like shorter growing seasons, wages for local farmhands, the environmental dividend of buying local and, hopefully, more bang for the buck flavour-wise.
Ross shows a head of garlic that’s slightly smaller than grocery store standard but twice the price.
“But when people understand the potency of it and that it isn’t the same product at all, then they’re willing to pay,” Ross maintains.
Ross has run the Birchcliff Village farmer’s market for the past six years at Warden Ave. and Kingston Rd. That, along with a popular indoor market, has hit it off with upper Beachers.
However, the recently-founded Guildwood Village market has had a few setbacks.
Its organizers had to quickly scuttle plans to hold the market among the lush gardens and statuary of Guildwood Park. Normally one of east Toronto’s most idyllic spots, a big patch of the park would be fenced off as parts of the historic Guild Inn were demolished.
With a month to go an Anglican church near the Guild allowed the market onto its grounds.
Since starting the market has struggled to build up clientele during this decade’s most spending-averse summer. One farm closed its table because of low sales.
Ross sympathises with family farmers who must decide whether to transport perishable goods into the city that will go to waste if unsold.
“Once it’s picked it’s picked,” she admits. “You can’t unpick it.”
Co-organizer Jennifer Johnston, who sells fish and cooks delicious home-made sausages, has spent five years at the Birchcliff market. She confirms the challenge of starting at square one.
“It takes a lot to get people away from the big box stores,” she says.
Ross, however, keeps a sunny disposition about the young market’s prospects.
“It’s a tricky business,” she says. “You have to have some sort of connection to doing this because it’s hard, hard work.”
Some years ago Ross walked away from a graphic design business she ran with her husband to lease land from an area farmer to grow vegetables.
“I was having trouble wrapping myself around somebody thinking that a brochure was an emergency,” she said.
Now she spends summers setting up tables and winters in farmer’s kitchens convincing them to sell at the market. She makes a full-time job out of a non-profit venture.
Ross says the payoff is the relaxed, sociable surroundings of an outdoor market.
“Every week I get to listen to music, and every week I get to see kids running and playing and eating and getting their face painted,” she says. “It’s beautiful. That kind of levels it out when you’re having a hard day.”