Toronto Star - Portrait of the North St. Lawrence Market
September 20, 2008
PATTY WINSA
STAFF REPORTER
It's 7 a.m. Saturday. The rising sun reflects off downtown towers and throws a rosy glow, a deserted movie-set backdrop to the beauty of the Flat Iron building.
Despite the time, vendors at the north market have been open for two hours. Tables at the corner of Front and Jarvis Sts. are filled with baskets of tender fruit — varieties of apricots grown to stretch the season and blackberries as big as your thumb — and piled high with autumn-hued vegetables. Behind those tables, and inside the north market, are farmers with nearly purebred pedigrees, whose families have been in the business for 100 years — 200 years even. Vegetable producer Willis Shank says his family has been a vendor since 1916, his grandfather, father, uncle and aunt taking the train down from Markham every week.
If the market has a King of Kensington — the guy who knows everybody — it's Paul Moyer, 42. An eighth-generation fruit farmer from the Niagara Region, Moyer first came here with his father when he was two. "He misbehaved even in those days," says long-time customer Roy Merrens, a Toronto resident who remembers Moyer from the early '70s.
"I'm considered one of the new farmers … and I've only been here 40 years," says Moyer. "It takes 20 years before you're established," he says. And Shank agrees with him. "Yes, people have to get to know your product, to get to know you."
But that's what Moyer likes too. "It's a community," he says. "Some of the people here are my best friends and I've known them since they were kids, and I know their kids and their kids … and we go out for breakfast together."
Moyer now runs the family farm — Cherry Avenue Farms — with his brother, who lives on the original 100 acres deeded to the family in 1799. With cherry season over, Moyer's tables are filled with freestone peaches and blood- red Elephant Heart pluots, a cross between a plum and apricot. Moyer continues the family tradition, bringing his daughters, Sabrina, 11, and Grace, 9 with him on Saturdays. "In a way it's very surreal," he says. "On one hand we live way out on a fruit farm in the middle of nowhere and on the other, my kids are downtown Toronto one day a week, looking at THAT skyline as the sun comes up."
Bob Taylor, 60, can trace his market roots to the 1890s, when his family took the train in from Streetsville. Today, Taylor sells cut flowers, which he grows on his farm in Rockwood, Ont. The blooms are in such demand that when Taylor sells them at the Ontario Food Terminal, businesses such as Pusateri's and Highland Farms line up. A female customer hands Taylor a flower, asking if she can add the peony to the bouquet he's assembling. Taylor's eyes are full of laughter when he replies, "Yes, you can, but it's a Dahlia."
Lorine and Harlan Clark, both in their 80s, still run their original egg farm in Port Perry, aided only by a neighbour who comes in two days a week. The pair has never missed a market. "God, a year sure goes by in a hurry," says Harlan, when Moyer reminds him that their 61st anniversary at the market is less than a week away. The Clarks grade their eggs not only by size and colour, but by the day they were laid. The couple may have to stop producing eggs in a year. At their age, Harlan says they can't afford to invest in the new and expensive equipment that is now required to run an egg farm.
