Americans love the concept of one-stop shopping. ”If you can’t find it at Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, you probably can do without,” Garrison Keillor tells us about his home town of Lake Woebegone. Arlo Guthrie sings the same theme; “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant — excepting Alice.”
Super Walmart stores all over the nation capitalize on the single stop. Stop in for groceries, hardware, and discounted underwear, all without ever needing to move the car.
One-stop shopping for everything you might want seems to be a “true fact” when you visit Zook’s Family Farm as well. Joseph and his young family are Pennsylvania Amish, moved to Aroostook County to take advantage of abundant open farm land at reasonable prices. Over the last several years, the family has built upon a deep fount of cultural knowledge to develop a successful diversified farm.
Handmade outdoor furniture emerges from Joseph’s carpentry shop at the end of the winter months to be loaded on a wagon and brought to town to sell. He displays with pride the jewel-like colors of his wife’s jellies and preserves that she puts up in abundance. The great wall of canning jars stands alongside bins of greens, rhubarb, and garlic scapes.
Careful planning and management bring to maturity tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash and potatoes long before most growers have gotten crops beyond the blossom stage. Using hoop houses to extend the season, judiciously applied manure from the cattle, horses, and poultry that populate the farm, climate-appropriate seed selection, and connections to the Keystone State, the Zook family has a variety of products to sell nearly year round.
You can stop at the Zook farm on Maple Grove Road in Fort Fairfield or the farm will come to you at the Presque Isle Farmers’ Market in the Aroostook Centre Mall parking lot. A visit to their table at the Market on Saturday between 8:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. yields a productive and interesting one-stop shopping excursion.
Delighted customers fill their arms and their reusable shopping bags with fresh fruits and vegetables to make a variety of healthy, tasty meals. They return the next week for an entirely different selection to enjoy. This is assuming the purchases even make it home. Shoppers nibble fresh peas still in their pods and exclaim over the flavor of juicy, tree ripened peaches from Pennsylvania while still standing in the parking lot. Can a swig of amber-hued fancy Grade A maple syrup straight out of the bottle be far behind?
Maybe you will need to make another stop after all!
The Presque Isle Farmers’ Market contact person is Gail Maynard, who operates Orchard Hill Farm in Woodland with her husband, Stan. Their phone number is 498-8541 and their email is orchhill@gmail.com.
