Leslie Forsythe has been a staple at the Whitby Farmers Market for over a decade, ever since her son initiated the Forsythe Family Farms booth as a means to earn money without impacting the family’s income.
Now, Forsythe runs the booth, packing it with fruits and vegetables every Wednesday at the Whitby Farmers Market from May to October every year.
“It was his enterprise,” Forsythe, 66, said at the recent holiday market in Whitby on Nov. 24.
According to Forsythe, her husband, who is enthusiastic about farming in Markham, ventured into farming in 1972 when he started the farm at 14th Ave. and McCowan Road in Markham. He farmed there until 1986, then moved to Kennedy Road.
They operated the farm there for another 27 years before moving to Green Banks in Scugog, their current location.
“You develop relationships with people and customers,” she said, recounting the feeling of changing locations, “I just had some customers come and say goodbye because they were heading to the east coast, and they’ve been coming for over 20 years to our farm.”
During those years at Kennedy Road, Forsythe said she and her husband developed the “agritourism aspect” of the farm. According to their website, school groups and families are welcome to participate in activities and walking trails on the farm.
“People can come and enjoy being on the farm and actually know that food comes from the land,” she said, after spending half an hour hand placing each price sticker on her product at the booth, “and they can participate in that journey.”
Today, Forsythe sees the Whitby Market as “community” and a way to bring her farm to the town, because not everyone is able to come out to her own farm.
The market was started by Meredith Bruni of Bruni farms 26 years ago with just a few vendors, before her friend Sara Demoe took it over five years ago during the pandemic.
“I ran it out of my house as a pickup spot, because we couldn’t open the physical location because of COVID-19,” said Demoe, who just finished her fifth season organizing the Whitby Market.
Running a market during the pandemic brought its own challenges.
“Even though it was an outdoor market, we still had to have protocols in place,” she said, “one direction traffic, we had to have certain areas cordoned off, you could only enter at certain times, only certain amount of people could come through, that kind of stuff.”
Demoe, who’s now the sole organizer of both the Whitby and Brooklin locations in Durham Region, estimates “well over a thousand” people frequent the Whitby market location.
Though she does most of the work on her own, she says her son and husband lend a helping hand to handle the physical work required to set up the market every week. The Town of Whitby also offers its support by letting her use the Whitby Public Library as the main location for the market.
“A lot of people actually think that we’re the town of Whitby’s market, just because that we’re on town property,” she said, “But we’ve just sort of come together with the town because it’s good for the town to have a farmers market.”
The Town of Whitby also advertises the market on social media, inside the library, and the printed newspaper when it existed, Demoe said.
Demoe plans for the return of the Whitby Farmers Market for its sixth season in May next year. She has the idea to find an indoor space to run the market year-round.
“But that’s just in my head,” she said.