Gloucester Green Farmers' Market

The best bread you can find in Oxford for reasonable prices, great eggs that make a difference in baking (and cheaper than supermarket), lovely pies if you prefer just to eat, fresh meat. It's a precious thing and I'm so grateful that I can get there in my lunch hour. Also some stalls change from the 1st to 3rd thursday like Benson's apple juice and some bread ladies. I love it!

TP (Unverified), 15/01/10

Just brilliant. I take time off work to come about every two to three months. I wish you were on a Saturday or a Sunday.

Mulders Mum (Unverified), 19/01/07

At both Gloucester Green and Wolvercote Farmers' Markets Renee the lovely Goat farmer can be found. Her yoghurt is deliciously sour and not sloppy, and comes in beautiful glass bottles. If you return them you get a discount on your next yoghurt purchase. And the cheeses are like little patties of goatiness. They're creamy and delicious. I particularly recommend the peppery one. The other excitement is goat cheese cake, but go early if you want to catch it! If you're feeling particularly energetic you could go and visit the goats in their home territory of the Windrush valley.

Jen Pawsey (DI Reviewer), 08/12/06

I wondered around the Oxford Farmers Market on the 17th August and became very excited at my first ever sight of purple cauliflower. I purchased one in haste and photographed the stall. I'm not just saying this, but it was the most delicious cauliflower i have ever tasted, and I would purchase a purple cauliflower from the farmers market again!

Ruth (Unverified), 18/08/06

There are two crucial pieces of preparation for a visit to Oxford's Farmers' Market: get a bank loan and hire a porter. For you will inevitably buy a great deal more than you intended.

Your correspondent goes for the unpasteurised milk and cream from Hurdlebrook Farm, rich creamy dairy from happy cows, not spoiled by cooking. But that's just one stall among many. The following description is not complete, as some stalls were just setting up and I had to return to honest toil in the Daily Info salt mines, but it should give you an idea.

I saw three cheese stalls, two cow (Skett + Gorsehill Abbey) and one goat (Windrush), the latter also offering delicacies such as goaty cheesecake and yoghurt drinks.

Two stalls offered eggs, one vegetables (carrots, leeks, kale, cabbage, purple sprouting, onions and potatoes). Another has an amazing selection of mushrooms, big flat ones and boxed assortments of exotic ones. Three or four have plants, two do bread and cakes, and one has honey and all kinds of honey products, from beeswax to candles.

Another sells trout, fresh and smoked, and yet another, Bensons, has many varieties of pressed apple juice.

Then there's a great number of meat stalls. Ranger's organic beef, Acorn Herd pork, Little Wittenham lamb, D&B Cox providing pigeon, rabbit, pheasant and venison. Eadle's Farm sell bacon, eggs and sausages, and torment passing vegetarians by frying their wares and serving them in baps on the spot. And if said vegetarians wish to flee the smell of sizzling meat by moving to the other end of the market, they will find no respite. For there lurks the infamous "roast pork and apple sauce bap" stall, the downfall of many a waverer.

The list is not yet complete. Godwin's Ice Cream Farm have a driveable stall, as does The Soupery. And there's at least a couple of people with interesting stuff in jars: chutneys and curds and marmalades and patés and the like.

As I left a man was putting large pies onto a table. Resolutely I strode on.

There's also a large arts and crafts section. But you can't eat those.

Ian Threadgill (Unverified), 02/05/06

To this I just want to add that in particular the bread stalls make your trip there worthwhile.

As I don't find much variety in Oxford's bread supply (apart from a few, totally overpriced bakeries...), this is the place to go to. They have several kinds of rye bread, sourdough breads, wholemeal, crusty... delicious anyway. They also have "lardy cake" which I know some people seem to be crazy about (it sounds funny but tastes quite nice if you're up for a little treat...)

amy (Unverified), 02/05/06