The Saturday Market
There’s something special about Saturdays
Market vendor Sylvia Andress and
her busking daughter Alyssa.
It’s 8 a.m. on Salt Spring Island and the Saturday market is coming alive. Busy vendors are unloading pick-ups and vans as they set up their booths. Gradually, the smell of fresh-baked bread and special-blend organic coffee mingles with the scent of the sea where it fronts on Centennial Park in Ganges.
A young girl at a card table carefully arranges her homemade greeting cards decorated with 3-D cut-outs; a friend selling peanut brittle is just down the way. The sound of greetings and laughter, and the tuning of fiddles of four young players bound for Alisdair Fraser’s fiddle camp on the Isle of Skye signals the flavour of the day to come.
Potters Dorothy and Peter Price are arranging shelves to display their beautiful ceramics. Dorothy sets out flower holders and places a single iris bloom in one, in another a sprig of lilies. There’s a serene beauty to her simple-yet-evocative arrangements, almost as if she is performing a kind of alchemy. She smiles: “The more simple the arrangement, the more elegant.”
Everywhere a similar transformation is underway. Bushels of farm-grown veggies and berries; brownies and banana bread; racks of tie-dyed shirts and dresses; lavender soaps and bees-wax candles; writing tablets of hand-made paper; bunches of fresh-cut flowers; chutnies, jams and relishes, alongside hand-wrought necklaces and earrings. Brightly dressed sellers string braids of garlic and show exquisitely crafted garden benches and wind chimes; booths sell smoothies, doughboys and fruitsicles — the list goes on and on with more than 150 vendors offering their wares.
David Wood, in another life proprietor of specialty food shops in Toronto, waves good morning as he sets out samplers of his famous Salt Spring goat cheese.
The feeling of special alchemy at work is no surprise to former market coordinator Matthew Coleman, who retired from the post in 2005.
“Salt Spring definitely has more interesting people per capita than any other place I’ve ever been,” he says. “People can start a market anywhere, but if it grows organically and has as rich and long a history as ours, people can feel it.”
What visitors feel, in fact, is the very richness of Salt Spring itself, its exquisite natural beauty and fascinating mix of multi-talented people. This diversity defines the island, not so much as a tight-knit community, but as one where people value, above all, their independence and creativity. This is what has drawn them here; this is the glue that holds them here.
A short distance from Dorothy and Peter’s pottery display, Marcus Knox (known as ‘Vikash’ to his yogi friends) lays out his beautifully crafted necklaces and bracelets. A single rose bud adorns the lap of the Buddha that serves as his centerpiece. Marcus makes his beads from rose petals (hence the term rosary) in a converted goat-shed studio so overgrown with wild roses and blackberries that his most frequent visitors are swallowtail butterflies and deer.
Visitors pick up on that. John Stasiuk, who with a group of eight has come by boat from Nanaimo, says, “We’ve been coming here for years. It’s the market and the people that draw us, the island’s remarkable lifestyle and its natural beauty.” Salt Spring’s market runs from about 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays from April 7 to October 27 in 2007.
A bit of history . . .
In spite of Salt Spring’s growing and changing population, from farmers, fishermen, loggers and hippies to retirees and wealthy cottagers from “away,” the personality of the Saturday Market has remained relatively stable in the past 15 years.
The island’s Parks and Recreation Commission regulates the market because it takes place on local park property. In 1992, the commission created a system limiting permits to Salt Spring residents who must “make, bake or grow” their wares, and assigning guaranteed space to vendors with a certain amount of tenure. When introduced, the new regulations created resentment — islanders hate rules! — and some vendors moved to less regulated venues. Now, most agree that the changes were necessary. They eliminated parking-lot scuffles over “best spots” and tables full of yard sale knick-knacks.
Even when in 2006 a bylaw was passed banning dogs from the market, howls of protest were few.
OTHER GULF ISLANDS MARKETS
Salt Spring’s Saturday market isn’t the only game in town through the summer.
The Tuesday farmers market sets up in the Ganges United Church meadow off Hereford Avenue from July through October.
Also on Salt Spring, a south-end marketplace sometimes sets up next to the Fulford Inn on summer Sundays in 2007.
North Pender Island holds a Saturday market at its community hall.
Saturna Island’s Saturday market is at the community hall.
The Saturday market on Mayne Island sets up at the agricultural hall in Miners Bay.
Gabriola Island holds a farmers market on Saturday mornings at the agricultural hall across from the post office, and a Sunday market at Silva Bay.