Kyneton Farmers Market

The Kyneton Farmers Market has been backing local growers since 2004 and now runs more than 50 stalls on the second Saturday of the month. It is accredited by the Victorian Farmers Markets Association, which is the part that matters most: accreditation means the person behind the table grew, raised or made what is on it, rather than buying it in to resell.

Produce, and the makers alongside it

The core is what a farmers market should be. Organic produce, fresh flowers, honey, jams, olives and a community vegetable swap where people bring surplus from their own gardens and take home something they did not grow. Around that sits a Makers section of handmade work, and the food-truck end that keeps the browsing going: vegan doughnuts, dim sims, spiral-cut potatoes. Live music is a regular fixture rather than an occasional one. Four and a half hours on a Saturday morning is a comfortable size, big enough for a full week's shop and small enough to finish.

Piper Street is the reason a lot of people make the drive from Melbourne. It was Kyneton's original commercial centre and is now a heritage precinct dense with bluestone: cafes, antique shops, galleries and the Kyneton Museum, which occupies the old Bank of New South Wales building of 1854. The market sits in the middle of it, at St Pauls Park, so the street and the stalls are effectively one outing.

Good to know before you go

Second Saturday, 8.30am to 1pm, and the first hour is the one to aim for if you want the produce rather than the leftovers. Park behind the market near St Pauls Church or on Piper Street itself, then walk, because the market and the precinct are the same trip. Bring your own bags and containers, since a market where the seller grew the food tends to have less packaging in the first place. If you have a glut in your own garden, the vegetable swap is genuinely open to newcomers rather than a closed club.