Farm Girl Market

Food retail in a place ringed by farms behaves differently from food retail anywhere else, and Chilliwack is thoroughly ringed by farms: 17,000 hectares inside the Agricultural Land Reserve, more than 700 holdings on it, close to 30 per cent of local economic activity. The supermarkets are all national and therefore absent from this directory. What remains is a layer most cities of this size do not have, made up of 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 stands that open with the corn in August.

The record gives a postal code, a neighbourhood and a category, and nothing further: no street number, no phone, no website. For a small grocery that is a real limitation, since what sits on the shelves in a business like this moves with the season and sometimes with the week. With nothing else published, the postal code is the only fixed point here and confirming anything means turning up. A first visit is better treated as a look than an errand, and the warm half of the year is when local growing is at its widest across the valley.