Before the farmers' market opens for the season, volunteers are working to put a permanent roof over their head.
The Mountjoy Farmers' Market's fundraising for a pavilion at its new location on Riverside Drive is ongoing.
The group is looking for companies to sponsor the 12 posts in the planned pavilion. Each post is $5,000.
“We do realize there’s a lot of small companies that might want to help out as well, but $5,000 might be out of their price range. A smaller company can share a post with another company where they each pay basically half, $2,500,” said Garnet Wilcox, farmers' market chair.
People can also donate to the project by contacting the group through Facebook.
“For example last year we had one of our vendors at the market who donated $200 to us, every little bit is appreciated because it takes a lot of time to plan and to fundraise and to get to where we need to be to have the finished product,” he said.
Planning for the pavilion started last year.
The market moved from the Mountjoy Arena to a more visible location in the Participark parking lot.
When that change was made the permanent pavilion, which will have room for about 20 vendors, was also announced.
Last year, Eacom signed on to donate the lumber and Goldcorp donated $25,000.
Wilcox said at this point, the group has its city building permit and is waiting to get the final pricing from companies.
With the goal being to have the first 2020 market Canada Day, he said they'd like to have the pavilion built in June.
“The big thing right now is we’re trying to get this building built for the summer so that all of our vendors have that permanent structure they can go to, they’re not going to be affected by the rain as much as last year. As nice as the tents are, it’s definitely not fun to be there at 7 in the morning setting it up in the pouring rain,” he said.
Moving the market to a more visible location was rewarded with an increase in foot traffic.
On a good week at the arena, Wilcox said they would have about 200 people.
"On an average week at the new location, because we have been using traffic counters, we hit about 500 people,” he said.
He said everybody is looking forward to the new season.
“There’s already some vendors that have contacted us. I don’t think any vendor from last year has said they won’t be there, so if everybody shows up, along with the new vendors that have been talking to us, then definitely it’s going to a great market and it’s going to grow from even what it was last year,” he said.
