Nanaimo North
Farmer's
Market
By Norman Wagenaar
If you’re looking to localize and diversify your Saturday morning shopping experience, then come to the market at the mall. You’ll find fresh city-grown produce, cakes in a jar, honey flavoured by Nanaimo lakes flowers, hand-tied fish flies, and plenty more.
The Our Neighbourhood Farmers Market is celebrating its second season of operation in the parking lot of the Nanaimo North Town Centre. City shoppers are enjoying a new source of local healthy foods, products and services, along with the experience of meeting the people who provide them.
Mall management sowed the seeds last year by offering spaces for vendors, advertising and even power for the booths. Vendors did well enough by the mall’s generousity that, this year, they’ve formed their own association.
Dolores Gottenberg is both president of the Our Neighbourhood Farmers Market Association and a vendor whose business demonstrates how markets can offer consumers goods and services produced, literally, next door.
Her agricultural venture, Dee’s Harbour City Farm, uses SPIN—small plot intensive gardening—to offer fresh produce that redefines the term ‘locally grown.’
“I am an urban farmer,” she explains. “I don’t own any land.” Instead, Dolores tends eight small gardens recruited from landowners around Nanaimo. She grows enough produce to supply farmers’ market customers, two city restaurants, and about 30 members of her veggie box program.
She produces an impressive variety of vegetables from gardens which total only about one-and-a-half acres. Dee’s summer offerings include lettuce, spinach, beets, carrots, rhubarb, radishes, beans, broccoli, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and other warm season produce. In the fall, watch for sprouts, squash and turnip.
At the other end of the farmer’s market Bill Pollard is selling an entirely different sort of local product—custom-tied fish flies.
“I’ve sold a number of them,” says the Nanoose-based angler and fly tier. “A lot of women shop here, it’s something for their guys.” Bill is quick to be politically correct. “I have to be careful,” he adds. “There’s some really good women fly fishers.”
Bill says fly tying is a great example of recycling. Among his materials are deer and alpaca hairs and pheasant tails, which he incorporates in lures mimicking the various bugs, that trout, steelhead, salmon, and bass jump for. He points out there are about 5,000 tied-fly patterns available to anglers with the savvy to know what makes fish bite, in which season.
High quality honey is another local product requiring knowledge of nature’s cycles. Ed Bussian of Cedar-based Fredrich’s Honey says business owner Theo Fredrich keeps a close eye on what’s in bloom as he moves his hives around.
Consumers can treat themselves with the tasty results of his close scrutiny. Fredrich’s fireweed honey, for example, is named after and delicately flavoured by wildflower bouquets growing near the Nanaimo lakes. Fredrich’s also offers fir honey, bee pollen, and for those who find 100 per cent pollen too adventuresome, a mix of honey and pollen sold as ‘bee bread.’
Next door Sue’s Preserves offers chutneys and marmalades especially popular among customers with specific dietary needs. Business owner Suzanne MacKinnon has also developed another niche product—cakes in a jar, which are based on Mennonite recipes. She says they’re great to “take hunting, fishing, boating, also as a gift.”
The Our Neighourhood Farmers Market provides opportunities for entrepreneurs of various stripes to market services and products.
Nanaimo newcomer Stephanie Labelle uses her vendor space to sell her mobile massage service. With a degree in kinesiology Stephanie blends west and east to offer Thai yoga massage, ayurvedic massage, and reiki. She’s also qualified as an ashtanga yoga instructor.
Market customers can try out one of her massages on the spot, or arrange for Stephanie to visit them at a later date. “It gets exposure into the community,” she explains of her market presence.
Near the market entrance busker Katelin Bowes accompanied herself on acoustic guitar as she covered Joni Mitchell and the Beatles and introduced her own original material. Shoppers were happy to listen and support her music. “It’s gone really great,” she reported. “I’ve sold a bunch of CDS.”
Katelin Bowes is just one of a lineup of local performers, ranging from independent artists to school bands, in weekly rotation at the farmers’ market. Children’s activities include a contest with a prize for the biggest pumpkin grown in a pot planted and painted at the market.
“We’re trying to become a destination,” says market manager Christine Craigie, who praises the Nanaimo North Town Centre for jump starting the venture and ongoing support. “We need each other,” she says.
Nanaimo shoppers are already putting a visit to the Our Farmers’ Market on their Saturday-morning ‘to do’ list. “It’s great,” says Mary Miller, whose purchases included jam, breads, tea towels, and a muffin. “We’ll definitely be coming back.”
“The markets tend to be kind of friendly,” says her husband Kurt. “You can go to a store (inside) all winter long.”
The Our Neighbourhood Farmers Market is located in the parking lot at the Nanaimo North Town Centre near the intersection of Uplands Drive and Oliver Road. Hours are 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., every Saturday until mid-October.
To learn more about market vendors, activities, and musicians, visit the Our Neighbourhood Farmers Market website at: neighbourhoodmarket.ca
