ECOSS Valley Market

Most of Melbourne's produce markets happen on a Saturday morning. This one runs from 3.30pm on a Friday, which is a deliberate difference: it catches the end of the working week in the Upper Yarra rather than competing with the weekend circuit, and it turns the shop into a couple of hours of standing around with a drink in the last of the afternoon light.

A market on the farm that grew it

The venue is Yarra Valley ECOSS, a not-for-profit community environment hub on 7.4 hectares at Wesburn, founded in 2006 on a site that had been a poultry farm. That matters to the stall list. Alongside the visiting producers selling fruit, vegetables, wine, cheese, chocolate and bulk dry goods, there is produce grown on the property itself, sold a few hundred metres from where it came out of the ground. Art and craft fills out the rest, and regular buskers play through the market. In the colder months the fire and mulled wine are as much of the draw as the shopping.

Wesburn sits between Yarra Junction and Warburton, at the far end of the valley where the tourist traffic thins out and the working farms take over. The site is a hub rather than a paddock with stalls on it: it runs education programs for schools and groups, hosts community and environmental events, and provides a base for sustainability projects, so the market is one of several things happening on the land in any given week. The same operator also runs the Warburton Valley Market on the first Sunday of the month, ten minutes further up the highway behind the Warburton Arts Centre, so the two cover different days at different ends of the valley.

Good to know before you go

Friday afternoon is a short window, so 3.30pm to 6pm is worth treating as the whole event rather than a range to arrive somewhere inside. It is a working farm site, which means uneven ground, real weather and footwear that can handle both. Bring your own containers and bags, particularly for the bulk dry goods, since buying without packaging is part of the point. The drive out along the Warburton Highway is the slow way in from Melbourne, so build the trip around the valley rather than treating the market as a quick errand.