The first customer pulled in at five after eight, before the sale was even supposed to open. By mid-morning the parking lot outside the Golden West Broadcasting studios on Sissons Drive was full of wheelbarrows, volunteers in Rotary aprons, and the smell of fresh produce. The club had been there since eight o'clock setting up, and the rush never really stopped.
This is the Rotary Club of Portage la Prairie's 47th annual vegetable sale, one of the longest-running fundraisers the club has ever mounted. For three days each fall, the lot at 2390 Sissons Drive becomes a drive-through market: you pull in, a volunteer walks up to your window, takes your order, and loads the bags straight into your trunk. You don't even have to get out of the car if you don't want to.
That convenience is not incidental. It is the whole design. "Some of the bags are pretty heavy," says club member Travis Foster. "We got some lifters here that will load up the wheelbarrows, and we'll load them right into your car." The club's president, Dave Roberts, put it more bluntly: "There's no small bags of vegetables here, you know." He was talking about fifty-pound sacks of potatoes, carrots, onions, and beets — the kind of haul that makes a wheelbarrow a piece of customer service.
The sale runs Wednesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., with a possible short Saturday session if anything is left over. "We're going to be here Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and a little bit on Saturday if we have anything left," Foster says. This year's selection includes carrots, parsnips, onions, pumpkins, and cabbage, with some vegetables offered in different sizes. There are no pre-orders; it is first come, first served.
What makes the sale unusual is not just its age but its arithmetic. Over 47 years it has raised more than $400,000. Every dollar stays local. "All the money that we make at these events goes right back into the community," Roberts says. In recent years the proceeds have gone toward the city's new skate park. Earlier generations of the sale helped fund the Rotary Duck Pond, the Portage Skateboard Park, and the club's student exchange costs. "100 per cent of the funds go right back into the community," says club member Preston Meier.
The 2026 edition arrives in a busy season for the club. This is its 75th anniversary year, and the club has a long list of projects on the go. The headline one is the Rotary Playspace, a proposed 1,200-square-foot, two-storey addition on the north side of Stride Place, intended as a free indoor space where families can spend time and children can play. Announced in May as the club's 75th Anniversary Legacy Project, it has already reached about $150,000 in fundraising, with a targeted 2029 construction date. An open house at Stride Place in late September drew residents to ask questions about the design. "Everyone loves it," says Tosha Hotel, who chairs the Playspace committee. "They said that it's something that's been needed here."
The vegetable sale is a much older institution than the Playspace, but it works the same way — quietly, annually, with the money folded back into the town that grew the food. The produce itself comes from growers around Portage la Prairie, and their participation is what keeps the prices down. Meier credits LA Quality Products, Jeffries Bros. Vegetable Growers, and SB Vegetable Growers with making the fundraiser possible, and with allowing the club to hold prices at last year's levels. "We've got some great growers, and we're able to keep the prices exactly the same as they were last year," he says. "They've been great partners with us."
Jeffries Brothers, based near Portage la Prairie, grows asparagus, red beets, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, cauliflower, and winter squash. The company's own description of Manitoba's growing conditions reads almost like a sales pitch for the sale itself: clean air, clean water, cool nights, and warm sunny days give the region's vegetables their high sugar content, intense colour, and taste. The harsh winters, it notes, serve as a natural sterilant.
The sale has also become something of a community ritual for the people who work it. On opening morning, the Central Plains Capitals junior hockey team turned out to help. Captain Troy Northrop and teammates spent about 30 to 45 minutes with Rotary volunteers preparing the site before the first cars arrived. "It's good to be able to help our community," Northrop says. "The Rotary Club does a lot for us, so it's good to be able to give back some." He added that the extra hands make the volunteers' day easier once the rush begins.
For Roberts, the appeal is partly the spectacle of it — a parking lot full of enormous vegetables and people who keep coming back year after year. Asked what anyone does with a fifty-pound bag of beets, he laughed. "Good question," he said. "Make a lot of borscht."
The sale opened under sunny skies, and by all accounts the weather cooperated. Roberts started the morning in a hoodie and shed it within half an hour, working up a sweat loading bags. "It's been extremely steady since," he said. "We've had a couple rushes where people were lining up."
That steadiness is the point. A fundraiser that has survived 47 autumns, through changes in the club's membership and the town around it, is less an event than a habit — one that Portage la Prairie has kept without missing a year. The vegetables change slightly from season to season, the prices have been held, and the volunteers still walk up to your window and take your order. You drive in, they load you up, and the money goes back into the community that grew the carrots in the first place.