Twenty-three stalls in a park-and-ride: inside Barrhaven's Farmer's market

Every Sunday from May to October, the Nepean Woods park-and-ride stops being a parking lot. Twenty-three vendors set up under white tents on Sunday for the Barrhaven edition of the Ottawa Farmers' Market, and by late morning the lanes between them were busy with people carrying bags, pushing bikes and stopping to look at flowers.

Eric Kyadondo supervises the Barrhaven location for the market association, which has been running since 2006. Twenty-three is a slightly quiet count. The market usually carries 25 to 29 stalls, he said, and this Sunday had no dailies.

The market has two kinds of vendors. Seasonal ticket holders booking every Sunday from May through October. The others are the daily bookers who show up and sell on the day. This Sunday, every stall belonged to a regular.

The association's rule is that everything sold has to be made or grown locally. "Every product you're going to look at is homemade or homegrown," Kyadondo said. The stalls on Sunday bore that out: maple products from Garland Sugar Shack, a bakery table under a Yummy banner, buckets of cut flowers, greens and squash and cabbages stacked in crates.

Barrhaven is the smallest market in the association and the newest, at roughly eight years old. The others run in Orleans, Westboro, on Main Street, and at the Aberdeen Pavilion at Lansdowne, which holds about 60 vendors and runs right through the winter.

The markets are connected with some vendors with stalls in Barrhaven and at Lansdowne on the same day.

The Barrhaven market runs Sundays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at the Nepean Woods park-and-ride, through October.