The fanciest roadside stand in Tburg

This time of year is marked by country roads dotted with tiny roadside stands selling the bounty of the September harvest.

The stands are usually simple: a self-serve money jar, painted wooden signs, fantastic prices and not much else. Blue Moon Flower Farm at the corner of Reynolds and Podunk roads in Trumansburg started out much the same way last year — just a cart with scissors and a meadow full of flowers available to pick. But it got a new shed in February, and now, this roadside stand moonlights as a full-blown country store on the weekends.

On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, the smell of Seneca Sunrise coffee fills the little Blue Moon Market shed, and every surface is lined with boxes of fruit and veggies for sale. There’s filled-to-the-brim baskets of freshly baked bread, scones, muffins, cinnamon rolls and cookies. It’s staffed by two helpful young women, and there’s even air conditioning or heat, depending on the season.

On Saturdays, the farm has been hosting a “Podunk Pop-up Market,” weather permitting. Vendors from nearby set up and sell their goods, and recently, there’s been an herbalist, a honey maker and a veggie farmer at the pop-up.

Blue Moon opened its new-and-improved stand this year on July 10, and co-owner Ann Stephenson said business has increased steadily each week. She and her partner, Jaye Bruce, received so much positive feedback from customers on their modest flower operation last year that they were inspired to expand the offerings in 2020.

“People were just taken with the meadow,” Stephenson said. “They’d come and bring their kids and found it to be a lovely place to be. We were planning on doing more. I’d been making a lot of jam. … We looked at sheds last fall and we found this. It was just a shell, no doors or windows.”

They were just starting to plan for the season when things started to shut down due to COVID-19.

“When the pandemic hit, we looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s make food and grow food,’” Bruce said. “At that point, we were just planning to do a small garden, but we ended up doing a much larger garden to sell veggies at the shed.”

The couple lives in an old farmhouse on the property and grows 45 varieties of tomatoes, 12 varieties of potatoes, beans, squash, herbs and flowers. They source the rest of the produce from local growers such as Horst Farms in Romulus, Gather Together Farm in Tburg and Johnson’s Orchard in Ontario, New York.

Stephenson and Bruce spend a couple of days a week traveling around upstate New York looking for the best ingredients from family farms and Amish markets.

“We are really good at curating the stuff that we would want for our table,” Stephenson said. “If it’s beautiful, flavorful and local, we’re all about it. And what we love about this is we get to share all that. People come in, and they’re like, ‘Tell me about this,’ and we’re like, ‘Yes! That is the best tomato. Jaye’s grown it for eight years.’ Or ‘These guys up in Romulus grow the most amazing squash and just wait until you try it.’”

Stephenson and Bruce both love to bake and cook and met while working in the kitchen at the Busy Bee Market in Interlaken a few years ago. They share a passion for food and make all the baked goods at Blue Moon in their home kitchen.

Bruce makes the breads, and Stephenson makes the hundreds of small treats, with seasonal specials each week like pumpkin muffins and roasted delicata scones. The pair uses herbs and produce grown on their own and other local farms and said they always dreamed of using their love of food to create community — something in high demand during the pandemic.

“Food is how people come together,” Stephenson said. “We all love being here in the Podunk Road/Waterburg Road neighborhood, but we don’t have any kind of community center. Since we started this, people have really resonated with having somewhere to come where they feel grounded and welcome and safe.”

Stephenson’s daughter, Tburg senior Eleanor Kephart, and friend Miranda O’Halloran, a freshman at UMass Amherst, manage the shop on the weekends. This has worked out well, as they’re both doing remote learning right now.

“They have been indispensable. It’s a wonderful gift for all of us,” Stephenson said about having the help. “And they have something they can be passionate about and involved in.”

Though the shop has only been open for a short time, it already has regulars. Market mornings are a flurry of activity, and neighbors come by bicycle, four-wheeler or car or just walk down the street. Patrons often set up picnics in the grass and flower fields.

The flowers, baked goods and brightly colored produce are especially photogenic and have helped them to create a social media following, catching the eye of people all over the region. Bruce said that word has spread fast about their new endeavor but that sometimes people find them, even on the back road, serendipitously.

“One early morning on a Sunday, this whole group of female cyclists cruised by, and they saw our tons and tons of tomatoes,” Bruce said. “A lot of them came back after their ride and they were just so excited to get the nice tomatoes, but they hadn’t even known we existed before they went by.”

While the baked goods and coffee are reserved for the weekend, there’s still reason to visit during the week. The Market shed is closed, but the porch and outdoor tables are always open and stocked with produce, currently pumpkins, mums, squash and tomatoes.

Everything outside — including the u-pick flower meadow — functions on the honor system when the shed isn’t open, and there’s a secret place to leave cash. Just last week, they added on a small, additional structure in order to keep produce safe from the elements during self-serve days.

Next up for the Blue Moon crew is a Jack-O-Lantern event on Halloween. Stephenson said that she knows many parents are struggling with whether trick-or-treating will be an option this year due to the pandemic, so they’ve devised an event that will allow for celebration and social distancing.

“We will invite people to bring the pumpkins they’ve carved and we’re going to light them up and line the whole meadow along the edges,” Stephenson said. “You’ll be able to feed the pumpkin that you like a quarter, and at the end of the night, the person who carved the pumpkin that gets the most quarters will win a pumpkin cake. And we’ll donate all the quarters to our local food bank.”

The owners said they plan to stay open (with adjusted hours) through the holidays, baking on weekends and taking pie orders for Thanksgiving and cookie orders for Christmas. They’re also looking to add more local crafts to the market around the holidays and hope to offer dried flowers and wreaths.

Stephenson said that she, Bruce and their family are excited for the future of Blue Moon Farm and Market, but for now, she’s just grateful to be able to bring joy to her community during this difficult year.

“We are proud to be doing something, however small, to make a place where people can feel renewed, simply by being around something lovely or greeted with a smile,” Stephenson said. “When we feed others, it feeds us. It’s reciprocal. That’s the magic of gratitude and abundance.”

New fall hours for the weekend markets are Fridays noon to 5 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The market accepts cash, checks, PayPal and Venmo.