Produce Gone Wild

Food shopping in Chilliwack works unlike most cities of this size, and it is worth understanding why before reading down this category. The supermarkets are all national and therefore absent. What sits underneath them is a layer of independent food retail that exists because the city is wrapped in 17,000 hectares of farmland carrying more than 700 farms: 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 through Greendale, Yarrow and Rosedale that open with the corn in August and shut when it is finished. Agriculture accounts for close to 30 per cent of local economic activity, and it shows on the shelves. Chilliwack is the largest dairy producing area in British Columbia, with poultry and greenhouse growing behind it, so the supply side of a small food shop here sits unusually close at hand.

No street address, phone number or website is published, only the postal code, which will place a map in the right part of Sardis without naming the plaza. Since what a shop of this kind carries moves with the season, and since the valley's growing calendar is short and emphatic, anyone driving over for one particular item should expect the answer to depend on the month. Late summer is when this trade across Chilliwack is at its fullest. February is a different proposition.