And the city’s heritage produce is likely to be on the menu.

Discussions between Slow Food Hunter Valley and Maitland council have begun to create a permanent market that features a wider range of food, and more farmers.

The supply of fresh food will determine how often Slow Food will apply to hold the market. The group’s leader Amorelle Dempster is hoping for a weekly or fortnightly event.

It is expected the markets will be held on a Thursday with the hours extended so people can shop in their lunch break.

Slow Food will submit its plans to the council for consideration this month. The council will do whatever it can to help make the venture possible, but cannot say how long it will take to process the group’s application. 

Ms Dempster will sit down with the nine producers who supported the trial markets over the coming weeks and seek their thoughts on its future.

She acknowledged the city’s cries for a more frequent market straight away, but said the overall plan for next year’s markets had to be thoroughly thought out.

She was confident farmers could offer fresh produce all year round, but they would have to change their farming approach to make it sustainable, and that took time.

The supply of fresh food would determine how often they would seek to hold the market, and she was hoping for a weekly event.

“We need to work out how we will be able to sustain a more permanent arrangement and how many suppliers we will need, and what they will bring,” Ms Dempster said.“This is changing the way farmers see their land, what they grow and how much of it they grow. It’s going to take some planning to bring it all together. “There’s no use everybody growing a lot of the same thing, we need them growing lots of varieties of everything in smaller amounts.

Ms Dempster said Slow Food wanted to strike the right balance between the needs of consumers and farmers.