The Grand Opening of the Farm Stand 8/8/21 and how we came to be

So we started thinking of having our own farm back in 2017 while we were off working on a farm in Kauai, HI. We were doing a program called WWOOF where basically you work on a farm in exchange for a room and food. The reason we decided to do this crazy WOOFing thing was that we had become disillusioned with our way of life living separate jobs and barely seeing each other. I was working as a personal trainer and Nick, having graduated from the New England Culinary Institute was working in a kitchen and it seemed we passed in our apartment like ships in the night. We wanted to spend much more time together and also to be outside, not in stuffy gyms and hectic kitchens. We moved to Kauai and lived for just under a year on an organic farm. We got to spend all our time together: working on the farm, hanging out in our farm shack, going to beaches, jumping off waterfalls and meeting lots of awesome people who passed though the farm. It was great but it had its drawbacks, we had no car on the island and so were reliant on other people to take us places. Also most of the food that we were growing was saved for taking to market so there we were growing organic produce but eating a lot of ramen and spam!

Now when we had told Nick’s parents that we were moving to Kauai to farm they said to us something along the lines of “we have land here that you can turn into a farm, it was a farm before we bought it”. So there we were in Kauai thinking about starting a farm in Vermont! The ideas started flowing, we would get ducks, goats and bees! Nick would bake things, make jams. We would expand the vegetable garden and plant fruit trees and bushes. We would start a farm stand!

So you’ll notice that a fair amount of time elapsed between 2017 and August 2021, that’s because dreams don’t come cheap and without a whole lot of work. We started by expanding the garden little by little and all by hand, no tractors and tillers and only organic practices (I’ll do a blog post about the garden expansion sometime). We have been adding fruit trees and bushes every spring and also inoculating logs with mushroom spores. In 2020 we started to get the first of the livestock which also required that I (Kat) had to learn how to woodwork so that the animals could have houses. Now the baking aspect also needs to be addressed. Turns out that if you’ve got pets with access to your kitchen you can’t make and sell baked goods from it so we had to build a commercial grade, pet free kitchen (I say ‘we’ but it was mostly Nick’s rockstar mum Mary! The kitchen was completed, kitted out and inspected this spring. The kitchen is a thing of beauty and stainless steel. With the kitchen complete I needed to get my bum in gear and build us that farm stand! Meanwhile Nick had to jump through all the hoops required in setting up a business; insurance, licenses and so forth.

August 8th was our Grand Opening! The weather forecast had predicted a whole day of thunderstorms but it was actually hot and sunny all day! We had duck and chicken eggs, loads of organic produce and Nick baked multiple types of bread, cakes and cookies. I’d had nightmares the previous night about nobody showing up but nothing could be further from the truth! Right from opening time at 10am it seemed the entire neighborhood showed up! It was a great atmosphere, people meeting new neighbors and others greeting each other as old friends. After being practically a recluse since the start of the Covid pandemic it was so nice to get to speak to so many people. We plan to keep setting up the farm stand every weekend until the Vermont winter sends us scurrying inside but since we can still bake and collect eggs through the winter we are hoping to have neighbors special order from us for pickup or delivery. Speaking of special orders-we do them now too, pics and descriptions of our baked goods are on “The Bakery” section of the website and you can email us at duckduckgoatfarm@gmail.com to arrange an order or I can take orders right at the farm stand!