Prom Country Farmers Market

"A Real Farmers Market" is how the Prom Country Farmers Market describes itself, and it backs the phrase with a guarantee: producers and stallholders grow, make or catch their own products. Around twenty stalls set up on the lawn at the Foster War Memorial Arts Centre on the third Saturday of each month, between 8am and 12 noon.

Twenty stalls, no resellers

The scale is worth being honest about. This is not a hundred-stall event, and it does not try to be. What twenty producer-only stalls buys you is a market where you can talk to the person who raised the pork or baked the sourdough, and where the range shifts genuinely with the season rather than being topped up from a wholesaler. Free-range pork products, olives, potatoes, sourdough bread, plant seedlings and eggs are regulars, with prepared food to eat there. A community stall takes excess produce from local growers and gardeners and resells it, which is a neat solution to the problem of the household with a glut and no stall. Single-use plastic bags are banned across all vendors.

Foster is the last real town before Wilsons Promontory, which is why a market of this size draws more traffic than its stall count suggests. Plenty of people stop here on the way in or out of the national park, and a Saturday morning market on the main street is an easy detour.

Good to know before you go

Trading is 8am to 12 noon, a genuinely tight window, so a 10am arrival is already the back half of the market. The venue is the arts centre lawn on Main Street beside the fire station, and it moves into the hall when the weather is wet rather than cancelling. Parking is on Main Street and the surrounding streets. Bring your own bags, because plastic ones are not available from any vendor, and bring cash as well as a card. Foster is about two hours from Melbourne, so this is best planned as part of a Prom trip rather than a day's drive on its own. Foster sits on Gunaikurnai and Bunurong country.