LIVING TRANQUILLE’S FARM MARKET
Imagine. It is Saturday morning, and you are strolling up to the Tranquille Farm Market as the smell of freshly baked bread lingers in the air. Inside, the market is bustling with energy as vendors put finishing touches on their attractive displays of fresh vegetables, in season fruit, range fed beef, organic eggs, cheeses, home-made breads, jams and fresh cut flowers. Most items are grown or made, onsite. Fresh, healthy, and seasonal – from the Tranquille farm “gate” to your family’s plates. Sound appealing?
Farm markets can be traced back 5,000 years when farmers congregated on the banks of the Nile River in Egypt to sell their products. In North America, the earliest record of an organized farm market was in Boston in 1634. The farm market business model in Canada has grown exponentially as farmers have added retail sales to their farm operations in response to the rapidly growing demand of customers seeking locally grown fresh food.
At Tranquille, you will live next door to where much of your food will be grown. If you have a green thumb, you will be able to access to a Community Garden area where you can manage your own small garden plot.
The Tranquille Farm Market will operate from one or more of Tranquille’s 100-year-old heritage barns. It will serve as the primary retail outlet for Tranquille Farm products. Additionally, there will be a strong programming component to the market aimed at enhancing the visitor experience through food education and family based agritourism activities. These could include but not be limited to, learning about fresh food preservation, turning farm product into value-added jam, jelly, or juice, exploring Tranquille’s Corn Maze, listening to some terrific buskers, or checking out a special event such as Pumpkin Chunkin during Thanksgiving’s harvest celebration.
What would you like your experience with the proposed Tranquille Farm Market to be? A place where you can pick up your family’s locally grown food requirements for the week? Or perhaps a place where you can meet up with a friend while your kids roam outside exploring the Tranquille Farm Market playground. Your conversation might turn to a discussion of what you learned the past week at the market sponsored Master Chef cooking class or what your neighbor learned at the market hosted Master Gardening day. Perhaps you would like your experience to include all the above and more.
As your visit to the market comes to an end remember to take the waterfront path back to your home or walk over to the Tranquille Winery to complete your shopping list. Read about what that might be like in the upcoming blog LIVING TRANQUILLE’S WINERY.
What would you like your Tranquille Farm market experience to be? We would love to know. You are invited to participate in the LIVING TRANQUILLE community engagement process www.facebook.com/liveattranquille.