Our "roots"

When Nature’s Pickin’s Market opened their doors in the summer of 2000, their dream was to bring local farmers with their bounty of fresh local fruit and vegetables to a “farmers style market” that was available year-round.  To add to the offerings, Nature’s Pickin’s Market added a deli and butcher shop featuring local beef, pork and chicken.  But the story doesn’t begin there…

In the early 1920’s, while living in Holland, Grandpa Appeldoorn took courses in Agriculture to take on the duties of caring for his mother and siblings.  He went into the dairy business, married the lovely Heinje and had 5 children. In 1948 the Appeldoorn family moved to Canada arriving in the dark of night to awake to what they called the “ten acre stump farm” that they had to clear to grow fruit and vegetables.  It was truly a farmer’s market as Grandma Appeldoorn weighed the potatoes, green beans and every other seasonal fruit and vegetable they grew and sold them to their neighbours from the cellar.  Later they moved to a larger farm where their home was always busy, churning milk into cheese and butter, storing it in a bucket in a well.  Grandpa Appeldoorn had his route of deliveries, providing freshly churned butter, cream and milk, tending to the pigs and subsequently selling the pork.  Finally, the Appeldoorn family settled on a farm on Ross Road, where Grandpa Appeldoorn settled back into dairy and chicken farming.

The Phillips family’s early days are in trapping and farming.  Grandpa Phillips and his family, owned a chicken and dairy farm on the corner of Clearbrook Road where, in those days, the milk truck would come by and pick up cans of milk that were left by the road side.  Since those early days of farming, the Phillips family has been part of Abbotsford growth,  into the city it is today; from clearing land for roads and the modern day “sub divisions,” to demolishing the hospital Doug’s dad was born in, making way for the MSA hospital (the hospital Doug was born in).

Nature’s Pickin’s roots begin with family, and family begins with community. The community of Abbotsford!