Richmond BC Farmers Markets and Local Food

My parents ran a produce stall at the Richmond Public Market through the nineties and into the 2000s, so I learned this city through cases of gai lan and which supplier turned up when he said he would. Which is to say I have opinions about where food in Richmond comes from, and the answer is closer than most people assume.

Roughly a third of Richmond is farmland. Not decorative farmland either. Drive east on Westminster Highway past No. 4 Road, or south down No. 5, and the city stops fairly abruptly and becomes fields: blueberries, cranberry bogs, corn, greenhouse rows, potatoes. On No. 5 Road you get the arrangement that says more about this place than anything else I could point at, a long row of temples, churches and gurdwaras facing the road with working farm fields behind them, ten minutes from the Canada Line and the Alexandra Road restaurants.

The Steveston market

The Steveston Farmers and Artisans Market sets up at the community park a few blocks in from the water, and it is the one people mean when they ask about a farmers market here. Small, friendly, weighted more toward crafts and prepared food than a pure produce market, and it pulls a crowd from well outside Richmond.

The thing people get wrong is that it does not run every week. It has historically been a handful of Sundays spread across the summer rather than a weekly fixture, and the schedule shifts from year to year. Check before you drive. I have watched families arrive at an empty field, and that is a rotten way to spend a Sunday morning.

Go in the first hour if you actually want produce, later if you are there for the atmosphere. Parking in the village on a market Sunday is genuinely difficult. I leave the car north of Chatham and walk, or ride in on the Railway Greenway, which is about the only time I feel organised.

The city centre situation is messier. There have been markets at Minoru, at various plazas and community centres, under various names, and they come and go. Look at the city's current listings rather than trusting a two-year-old article, mine included.

Buying at the farm gate

This is where the real value sits, and it is barely organised at all. Through the summer the east and south edges of the city put out roadside stands. Some are staffed, some are a folding table with a cash tin and a hand-lettered sign giving the price per dozen. Corn runs from about August into September, and Richmond corn in a good week is the reason I stop pretending I am going to cook anything complicated. Blueberries are mostly July into August, with u-pick at a few farms if you want to make an afternoon of it and you do not mind the heat coming off the rows.

Practical notes. Bring cash in small bills, because the honour boxes cannot make change and the staffed stands usually prefer it. Bring your own bags, and a cooler if you are going to be driving around for an hour. Go in the morning. And if a stand is sold out of something by ten, that is a good sign about the stand rather than a bad one.

The wharf, which is the actual local food story

If you do one local food thing in Richmond, do this. Boats sell directly to the public off the dock at Steveston, and it is not a demonstration staged for visitors. It is a working fishery selling its catch, and what is available depends entirely on openings and season, which is exactly why it is worth going.

Spot prawns are the event. The season opens in May and it is short, a matter of weeks, and when the boats have them there is a line and a real chance of the day selling out before you get there. Bring cash, bring a cooler with ice, and go early rather than at lunchtime. Across the rest of the year you will see salmon when the openings allow, tuna in late summer, halibut, sablefish, sometimes crab. I am deliberately not giving you a calendar for those. The openings move, and anyone who tells you with confidence what will be on the dock in a given week is guessing.

Ask what came in and when. The people selling are the people who caught it, and they will tell you straight. If you have never broken down a whole fish, say so rather than nodding along; you will get a better answer and probably a better piece.

If you would rather someone else dealt with all that, the wharf has options within a few minutes' walk. Pajo's Fish & Chips out on the dock is the one everybody knows and it earns its lineup on a clear day. Blue Canoe Waterfront Restaurant and Catch Kitchen + Bar both put you over the water. Steveston Seafood House is the older, more formal room if the occasion calls for a tablecloth.

Cranberries, and one week in October

Richmond grows a serious amount of cranberry, and the harvest is the best agricultural spectacle in the city by a wide margin. The bogs are flooded and the berries float, so you end up looking at acres of solid red, which never photographs the way it looks in person. Mid to late October is the window.

Richmond Country Farms, out along Steveston Highway toward the east side, runs a fall event around the harvest with a wagon ride out to the bogs, and it is the easiest way to see it properly with kids in tow. The format, the dates and whether you need to book have all changed over the years, so look it up rather than turning up hopeful.

The Sharing Farm and the garlic

Out at Terra Nova in the northwest there is a non-profit farm growing food for the food bank, on land that has been in agriculture one way or another for a long time. Good place to take a kid who has never seen a row of anything growing, and a short walk from the dyke, so it folds into a morning.

Late summer usually brings a garlic event out there, which sounds niche and is unexpectedly busy. I have come home with more garlic than two people can reasonably use, twice, and I would do it again. The park around it has community garden plots and an orchard. Plot waitlists here are long, which tells you how many people have already had that thought.

Groceries, and the part nobody writes about

Richmond's everyday food shopping is one of the best things about living here, and it has almost nothing to do with markets in the weekend sense. The Richmond Public Market on Westminster Highway near No. 3 Road still has produce vendors and a food court, and I am not remotely neutral about that building. Beyond it, the small greengrocers tucked into strip plazas along No. 3 Road, along Alexandra, and out toward Blundell will usually beat a supermarket on both price and turnover, particularly on greens, mushrooms and anything with a short shelf life. Watch what the staff are restocking rather than what the sign says.

The fish and butcher counters in the larger Asian supermarkets are the other half of it. Live tanks, whole fish, cuts a mainstream chain will not carry. It is just how a lot of Richmond shops on a Wednesday, and if you live here and you are not using them you are paying more for worse.

Where it all ends up

I am a bad cook and I am honest about that, so a decent share of what I buy at a farm gate ends up sitting next to something someone else made. Steveston Bakery on Moncton Street is my default loaf. Diplomat Bakery is the other half of that same errand. Little Fox Bakehouse up in the Golden Village is worth a detour when I am already on that side of the city. And Sally's Homemade Ice Cream is what I do with summer fruit once I have accepted I am not going to make anything myself.

For drinking local, Britannia Brewing Steveston is the walk-home option after a market morning, and Fuggles Beer down in Ironwood is the one I go out of my way for. Neither is a farm, but both are made here, and that counts for something.

A rough calendar

• May: spot prawns at the wharf. Short season, go early, bring cash.
• June and July: berries start, u-pick opens, the Steveston market gets going.
• August: corn, blueberries at their best, garlic at Terra Nova, roadside stands along the east side.
• September: late corn, squash, the last decent market Sundays.
• October: cranberry harvest and the flooded bogs. The one unmissable week of the year.
• Winter: farm gates close, the wharf keeps working, and the greengrocers carry the season.

You can buy prawns off a boat in Steveston and be eating lunch in the Golden Village an hour later, and neither half of that day feels like a special occasion. That is the part I like.

Richmond is a farm town with a working fishing dock at one end and one of the densest commercial districts in the country at the other, and the food follows from that whether anyone markets it that way or not.