Jasper residents could soon have access to freshly picked vegetables from the Robson Valley.

The Robson Valley Growers, a sub-set of the Three Valleys Community Development Co-Operative, has plans to pilot a project that would deliver produce to Jasper residents harvested in the Robson Valley the same day, according to Pete Amyoony, one of the founders of the co-op.

He says the group is in the process of setting up a website where growers can go on the site on Monday or Tuesday and list what they have for sale.

Tuesday and Wednesday buyers – mainly residents, but also restaurants and stores – can log on and order what they wish. Thursday, the produce would be harvested and taken to a central location in Robson Valley where the orders would all be sorted, then put on a truck to Jasper.

From there, residents could pick up and pay for their orders at a central location in Jasper later in the day.

“That’s what were thinking of. We’re going to try it on a very small scale this summer and see if it works, maybe a couple times a month, and see if people are really interested in doing that. Because, that means that your produce would be picked on Thursday morning and it would be in your refrigerator that afternoon. You can’t get much fresher than that,” Amyoony says.

The growers held a presentation at the Jasper Library recently that left many residents interested in the idea of buying locally grown and raised food. The presentation was well received, Amyoony says, and many Jasperites also showed an interest in coming to the Robson Valley to meet the farmers, so they know who is growing and raising their food.

This, he says, was very well received by the growers.

Amyoony has been growing organic food for 40 years in Dunster and has been a part of Willing Workers on Organic Farms, where he’s had people email him from Belgium, France and Germany to come and work for a week or a month in exchange for their food and board in Dunster. At their meeting in Jasper, he says residents asked if they could do the same thing, for a week or a weekend.

“We all said ‘Yeah, sure, that sounds great,’” Amyoony says.

According to Amyoony, the growers were asked by a store in Jasper if they could be the sole distributor of their produce, to which they said no.

“We all said no, and that we want to cut out as many middle people as possible. Our ideal aim is for us to grow the food and sell it directly to the person who’s going to eat it. Second best would be if restaurants are buying food to use in their meals, then they could get it from us too. We have no problem with that, but no sort of middle person all the time,” he says.

The website will also have contacts for the farmers and lists of what products they sell, as well as recipes.

Amyoony says it’s all about sustainable eating. “I’ve been an organic grower for 40 years, so I’ve been reading and talking about it for years, and it’s finally coming around to where a lot of people are interested in it.”

More information will be available on the local food program as summer approaches.