Harvest Launceston Community Farmers’ Market

Each Saturday an asphalt city car park is transformed into a vibrant award winning community farmers’ market that brings locals into town to shop for fresh produce, catch up with friends and neighbours and support the local economy. Harvest Launceston is also often featured on the “must see” to do list for visitors to the State.

The Harvest Launceston Community Farmers’ Market was established to bring the ‘bring the world’s best produce from the producer to the people’. In essence, Harvest Launceston creates a sense of place from a barren carpark to a hub of social exchange that has become a vital asset to local communities.

As dawn breaks each Saturday, irrespective of the weather, the car park starts to fill up with the arrival of producers from across the State. For many, their weekly journey to the Harvest market begins well before the 8.30 am ring of the bell. All our stallholders are vetted to ensure that they are the real deal, that they produce what they sell and sell only their own products. All our farmers give up their on-farm time to be at the market.

When you buy apples from Windara Orchard you know they are grown locally on the banks of the Tamar, that they have been picked and packed by those who sell them to you.

Our market gardeners are up until late the Friday night prior to market, picking and packaging the amazing vegetables that each week adorn the trestle tables. The jam makers, brewers and winemakers are passionate about the produce they bring, often nurturing it from field to bottle, or know exactly where the fruit that they transform comes from.

Our lamb, pork and beef producers care about their animals, tending them very often from birth, to paddock to plate. Meet Guy Robertson and his piglets from Mount Gnomon Farm. Visiting Guy’s farm, just outside Penguin, you will be welcomed by two hard working border collies who will introduce you to a hive of activity. There are cheeky piglets charging around, sows feeding and chickens scratching about in the garden. Further out live the cows and the sheep, all rare breeds, an on-site butchery and a paddock of 1,000 cider trees. Every Saturday morning come rain or shine, Guy drives an hour and a half from his farm to be ready and smiling for you at 08:30.

Ask Guy or Larry from Real Beef what to do with a certain cut of meat, or a new type of sausage. These farmers know how their animals are reared because they are the ones who care for them.

Harvest Launceston has twice been recognised as Australia’s outstanding farmers’ market, in 2013 and 2017 and is accredited as an authentic farmers’ market as it meets the criteria set down by the Australian Farmers’ Market Association.  In 2019 Harvest Launceston also took out the Launceston Chamber of Commerce “Building Communities” Award.

See you at the market!