Great and Grateful News!

Hello Market Friends:
We were blown away (almost literally) last week. Packing orders outside in the wind is not ideal, to say the minimum. However, we were buoyed up by the outpouring of supportive messages from many of you. Thank you all for your patience, enthusiasm and understanding. The move to an online market is a big task, and it has taken a huge leap forward in the past week.

Many of you know the Reverend Gary van der Meer as the friendly, social-justice minded Pastor at St. Anne’s Anglican Church. He’s also a market regular, and with support from the community at St. Anne’s, we have been given free use of their Parish Hall at 270 Gladstone (a few blocks south of the park) as our Neighbourhood Depot beginning this week. WHAT A GIFT!! We are tremendously grateful.

This means farmers and vendors can drop off their pre-orders and go, and our team can safely assemble them for distribution without windburn! We will also be able to manage order pickups more easily, so you won’t be re-directed to delivery, AND we have a new bicycle delivery crew to get orders out quickly for those who need that service!

Our market ‘store’, www.dufferingrovemarket.ca, will re-open Sunday at 5pm (about 24 hours later than we plan to as a rule) so Peter Wills can add features, fixes, and vendors. Ordering soon after we re-open gives you the most product selection AND first choice of pickup times. This week, if your postal code is outside our delivery zone, you won’t be able to select delivery. We will have a ‘drive-through’ set up for people who need to pickup by car.

We have many more vendors on board this week, and more coming soon:

Welcome to our dear friend Ming and Ying Ying Soy’s products, the ChocoSol team and all those good things you’ve been craving, the crew from Earth & City with healthy and delicious treats, and Jennifer & Tim from All Sorts Acre with ‘everything sheep’.

We still have a lot of work to do polishing the rough edges, and we ask for your continued goodwill as we work to do that. We want to do it right, for you and the food producers we love.

Anne and Crew