Every Thursday – Rain, Snow or Shine!

BY ANNE FREEMAN
Photography by Laura Berman

On a Thursday afternoon at the height of the harvest season, neighbourhood friend Donnely Smallwood dropped by the park. As we stood chatting, surrounded by rows of tents and tables and dozens of other ongoing conversations, she remarked, “Remember that meeting when we wondered if we could have a farmers’ market?”

When I joined other community members, recreation staff, and three farmers in the Dufferin Grove Park rink house in Toronto seven years ago, we really didn’t know what we were getting into. None of us could have predicted how big the wave of interest in markets and local eating would become, or the challenges, friendships and learning that would come out of our discussion.

Markets around Toronto were relatively scarce then, and we lacked contacts with farmers who would be willing to come into the city. But Jutta Mason and others working at Dufferin Grove already knew that food-related programming in the park was a great catalyst for creating friendly connections among people. Their innovative use of wood-fired ovens, campfire cooking, and gardens had transformed the 14-acre downtown park – at one time a pretty scary place– into a welcoming and inviting community centre without walls.

Our lucky break came when the park’s bakers took bread over to Riverdale Farm’s year-old market and Jutta met some farmers who wanted a winter option to sell storage crops, meats, and meals prepared from farm ingredients. What Dufferin Grove had to offer in the way of shelter wasn’t glamorous – a skating-rink change-house and a Zamboni storage garage – and it hasn’t changed since then, but the lively rink season continues to bring lots of people to the park, and the wood-fired ovens are a special asset.

The market started up at the most unlikely time of year – November – when frost has finished off all of the tender crops and outdoor markets have closed up for six or seven months. These days, with so many more markets around, it would be more difficult to find farmers willing to invest the time it took to build from such small beginnings, but Ute Zell, Zalia Conde and Lorenz Eppinger wanted to give it a try, and other producers soon came on board. The farmers who formed this first core group were all farming organically, and this seemed a good fit to us. We had a huge supermarket just across the street, so there wasn’t a shortage of food in the area, but we were excited to have the opportunity to work with small farms, to support growing methods that benefit the land, and to buy organic foods for our families.

Within a few years, the market grew to include about thirty vendors (a comfortable maximum for the setting) and our customers had become known for their loyal support. While we have shoppers of all ages, so many young families enjoy meeting up at the market that we’ve often wondered if our neighbourhood has a higher than average birthrate, and we sometimes have to sort out stroller-traffic jams in the rink house. It has been great fun watching the baby “regulars” grow along with the market.

For better or worse, we didn’t start with a big set of rules; market guidelines grew from trial and error as well as from studying other markets’ experiences. Principles like transparency (a willingness to share all information about the source and production methods of the foods at the market), grower-priority (valuing our growers’ crops ahead of any other products) and a positive spirit of cooperation and collaboration are essential elements of our guidelines. Along the way, the wisdom of farmers, on-site staff and longtime customers has been invaluable, and the camaraderie among vendors has contributed to the friendly atmosphere.

Small-scale Toronto food entrepreneurs, eager for the opportunity to bring their products directly to customers, also saw our market as an ideal venue and were eager to join in. While we always keep a strong farmer presence at the market, urban vendors often build on the farm connections: the beets and sweet potatoes in Alli Millar’s specialty breads come from local growers; Dawn Woodward brings bags of the CIPM Ontario-grown and -milled flours she uses in her crackers to market so home bakers can also work with local grains; vendor Alli Harris makes fish fritters with Andrew Akiwenzie’s catch, and rotis with Ted Thorpe’s vegetables; and the list goes on.

Soon, we began to be overwhelmed by more vendor applications than we could accommodate and were also receiving requests for advice and assistance from other neighbourhood organizers wanting to open farmers’ markets. Connections grew through a FoodShare project supported by Project for Public Spaces in New York, and over time a very positive working group of both newer and more experienced market organizers came together to form the Toronto Farmers’ Market Network. We’ve all benefitted from sharing ideas and working as allies. And that work has now expanded into efforts to strengthen the region’s markets through a developing Greenbelt Farmers’ Market Network.

At Dufferin Grove Park, many of the community-building projects have had market links. Friday night suppers based on market-sourced ingredients extend the connection with the farmers beyond market day. A partnership between the park’s bakers and the Stonegate Community Health Centre in Etobicoke has helped to strengthen the farmers’ market operated there. The recent Sister Park link with Thorncliffe Park, located in a neighbourhood comprised almost entirely of new immigrants, takes this positive thinking into other parts of the city, as well. Food brings people together.

Dufferin Grove Market Today
The market is at its most glorious in late summer, when the produce tables are loaded down and the trees’ green canopy shades friends and families enjoying suppers on the grass. In winter, space limitations and difficult weather can present challenges, but the market still makes an important contribution to farmers and the community. Winter markets support producers of meats, cheeses and other year-round products, and offer growers an incentive to develop good storage and season-extension techniques so we have as much local food as possible through the colder months. They also hang on to a core group of regular customers without experiencing the annual setback when the market habit is broken and shoppers return to supermarkets. It isn’t easy, though, when store shelves beckon with a full rainbow of produce no matter what the season.

Our solution has been to have our farmers supplement their homegrown food offerings with other Ontario or non-local produce when it’s needed, in order to keep a large enough customer base and sales volume to make the farmers’ trips into town worthwhile. Some people consider this to be a controversial practice, even though growers’ own is given priority. No one was talking about the 100-mile diet when we first opened (and locavore had not yet been added to the dictionary), but now we do have more customers who only want what’s locally grown, and that’s just fine, as our goal has consistently been to help local farmers succeed.

The park’s wood-fired ovens are the warm heart of our market. Every week, the bakers turn out hundreds of crusty loaves of sourdough and artisan bread, sticky cinnamon buns, and pizzas made with toppings from local growers to feed hungry market-goers. There’s a special magic in winter when the scent of wood smoke and freshly baked bread rises in the chilly park air.

Through our newsletter and website we share the progression of the seasons outside the city as farmers report on events we can’t see at  the market, such as greenhouse planting or the hatching of heirloom turkeys. Learning about “works in progress” is especially heartening in the early days of spring, when everyone feels impatient for a fresh start – and fresh local produce.

Not all the news from the farmers is good. This past summer, when blight destroyed all one hundred varieties of Ben and Jessie Sosnickis' heirloom tomatoes and then moved through our other growers’ farms, as well, we felt a keen awareness of the huge gamble that is farming. How could so many months of hard work be gone in a few days?

Regular country-to-city communication has given our marketgoers a greater understanding of the other kinds of challenges faced by Ontario farmers, such as daunting regulations, high production costs, and competition from artificially cheap imports. Our rural population has become a smaller fraction of Canadians than ever before and we have to hope that urban-dwellers will speak up in support of our food producers and rural communities. Although farmers’ markets account for only a small percentage of total agricultural sales, they do provide a special opportunity for city and country to come together.

Set-up time every Thursday is still one of the highlights of the week for me. Hauling out the tables, chatting with the farmers as they arrive, admiring the abundance coming out of the trucks and the bake ovens, and watching the colourful and varied array of vendors’ displays take shape are a great antidote to the indoor work of urban life. I feel privileged to be part of the story that grew from that long-ago dinner meeting at the rink house.

Dufferin Grove Organic Farmers’ Market
873 Dufferin St., Toronto
Open year-round every Thursday from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Get more information and sign up for the market newsletter at www.dufferinpark.ca

Toronto Farmers’ Market Network (TFMN): www.tfmn.ca

Edible Toronto's complete listing of farmers’ markets throughout Southern Ontario can be found here.

Anne Freeman is the co-ordinator of the Dufferin Grove Organic Farmers’ Market and the Greenbelt Farmers’ Market Network.