The Sackville Farmers Market is hosting the second annual Harvest Supper this year, where they will serve hyper-local produce to 100 guests.
Market Manager Michael Freeman is excited to bring people together for a family-style meal, especially after being apart for so long due to COVID-19. The Supper itself had to be put on hiatus during the entirety of 2020 for safety’s sake.
Since the province has entered the Green phase, the Sackville Fall Fair is back on and Freeman is glad to conclude the festivities with a meal smack in the middle of downtown Sackville.
“We did this two years ago and it was quite lovely. People ended up sitting with people they know, and people they don’t know, and getting to know each other. Sackville has a really rich kind of diversity of different kinds of people, but often we don’t interact with different kinds of people. It’s sort of fun to have a situation where you end up sitting with someone that you might have known from seeing them around, but they’re kind of different than you and then you’re all eating together. That’s that’s a good common denominator.”
The menu features steak from Dixon’s Fresh Farm Beef, grilled by none other than Dave and Wendy Epworth who co-own the historical Mel’s Tearoom. The beef will be complimented with tomato salad prepared by chef Kim Martin, who hosts three course meals at Cranewood on Main, and mesclun salad grown and plated by Willow Farm. To conclude the family-style service, guests will tuck into a seasonal fruit tart baked by Ketchup With That Kitchen with a scoop of Trueman Blueberry Farms ice cream. The event will serve drinks from the Bagtown Brewing Company, but Freeman assures parents that children are more than welcome.
Tickets are on sale now, and Freeman says they are still looking for volunteers to help set up, tear down, and serve. He also says that the supper will conclude with a presentation about the future of the Farmers Market, which provides many of the artisans and farmers with a place to sell the very produce they are serving.
“The Farmers Market has been working for many years now, at the consultation level, with vendors and the public and on other collaborative level with the town, to try to get us to a place where our vision of having a permanent facility that the market can operate and share with other community groups. We want to make that real. One of the pieces of that is doing an estimate and doing all this design work with partners. That is a long process. In the meantime, we know that we’re going to have capital costs, and so we’ve sort of decided the time is now to start saving up in that piggy bank.”
He welcomes anyone who would be interested in contributing to this effort to get in contact with him to work out the details. Freeman can be reached at sackvillemarket@gmail.com.
