Downtown farmers’ market sees a successful season

This year has brought much success for the many vendors at the Downtown Windsor Farmers’ Market.

Vendors arrived at the Charles Clark Square on a damp Saturday morning to the sight of many customers with smiles on their faces. The vendors too, were happy to share this year’s success.

“We did extremely well,” said Leslie Balsillie of The Fruit Wagon. “It’s our first year here and we’re very happy. It’s been great right from the beginning right ‘till the end so it hasn’t slowed down at all. We found that we’ve really picked up customers as we went along and by the end most of the customers we had were repeat customers so we were very happy with that.”

Throughout the season there were also some appearances from major names.

“Bob Blumer, host of the Food Network’s The Surreal Gourmet, loves our jam,” said Balsillie. He came to our booth and he had some of our jam for breakfast and he really enjoyed it.”

Vendors say the market strives to connect Windsorites with food providers of surrounding areas by promoting local, fresh and in-season food accessibility.

“The Windsor market’s been very good this year,” said Grace LaSorda of Zone 6 Gardeners. “The market committee’s worked really hard and we’ve got a lot of new people coming.”

Profits are important for the vendors and they were happy to discuss them.

“We have quite a bit of expense because all of our stuff is hand-harvested and packed so we are priced at a level where we can be profitable,” said LaSorda. “We appreciate all the work the market committee does for it and the market dollar program’s been very successful.”

Some business owners were newcomers to the market in 2014 and were pleased to have been a part of this year’s market.

“We did fantastic,” said Greg Martin of La Sila Bakery & Pizzeria. “This is our first year with it and it’s been phenomenal so we’re going to come back every year. Some days we do better here than we do at our store front which is great.”