Berry Bounty Farms

A shop that sells food grown on the ground it stands on is an ordinary arrangement in Chilliwack and a rare one almost everywhere else. Two thirds of this municipality is farmland inside the Agricultural Land Reserve: 17,000 hectares, more than 700 farms, close to 30 per cent of local economic activity, and more than twenty-five food processing companies on top of that. Food here is an industry rather than a category of shopping.

The supermarkets are all national and therefore absent from this directory, which leaves the independent half of the grocery trade: farm stores selling their own beef, dairy and eggs, greengrocers taking produce from a few kilometres away, butchers, bulk and health food shops, and the roadside stands that open with the corn in August. It is the more interesting half of the two.

The name says what the business is built around, and soft fruit is the one thing on a farm that will not wait. What is available at any point in the year is a question for the farm rather than for a directory, and a website is published here, which is the sensible place to look before setting out. Farm-gate selling across the valley follows the season closely, and quietens once the corn is done. No phone number is recorded, so the website and the postal code are what there is to work with.