BUTLER COUNTY, Ohio – The Roadside Stand Trail, billed as a countryside tour of local bakers and makers, has really taken off. Eight farm stands are taking part in the five-week tour which ends June 21. Participants receive a passport, which they have stamped at each stand they visit. They turn in the completed passport for a chance to win prizes.

The eight stands are 7 Wonders Farm, The White Cart, Harvest Moon Homestead, Weathertree Farm, Butter & Bloom, Klein Sprouts, Hilltop Family Farm and Wildflour Bakery. They offer baked goods, flowers, eggs, vegetables, meats, crafts, plus much more, all local.

“It’s created lots of good traffic,” said Wes Flach, owner of Weathertree Farm. 

“Lots of folks are coming with passports and doing the trail. I feel like it really took off, and it is great because it introduced a lot of people to our stand who hadn’t come before. Hopefully, that will continue to bear fruit, and people will think about coming here instead of going to Kroger’s.”

Stand owners Mary Sutton, owner of Harvest Moon Homestead, Aimee Highley, The White Cart, and Nickell Morgan, Klein Sprouts, brainstormed the idea. Happily, it turned out to be a much bigger project than they had anticipated. The passport provides a map listing the farm stands and locations, their hours, and the products they offer.

“It has been way more successful than anyone expected,” Sutton said. “We had 150 passports, and they were all gone the first weekend (they printed more). I have had maybe twice the business I normally get on my stand. We have all been busy. We’ve had a lot of new customers.”

Added Highley: “It has been interesting, interacting with some of the customers, because they love supporting local.”

Highley and her family have always baked. People told her, “You should sell this.”

“I started with bread; I had done that for four or five years. I got my mom and my sisters in to help me because they all had the same mindset. My husband built me this white cart, and we would run it out to the end of the driveway.”

The cart was often packed to the gills, so Highley expanded. She had an old greenhouse, which she painted white. So, the white cart is now, really, the white house.

Sutton uses a camper to market her sourdough products, pantry staples, jewelry and gifts. She always wanted to have a farm stand and grow vegetables, but that never happened. So, she started with sourdough.

“I started with the sourdough to supplement other things I was doing,” Sutton said. “I was working full time. When COVID hit, I started working from home; I started doing more of the sourdough, and I thought I could actually make this a business. That’s when I opened the farm stand. It took a while to get an actual solid customer base, but at this point, this is a full-time job. It’s kind of wild.”

Morgan, a New York transplant, came to her business from a different direction. In 2022, her son was diagnosed with cancer. The family completely changed their diet, cut out all processed foods, went organic, and did not eat out at all.

“That’s when we started making our own bread,” Morgan said. “We had a little balcony garden, so we had our own produce and herbs, and things. After my son passed away, we moved to Hamilton, and we started a big garden, which I shared with the community. So, we started building our farmstand, and we put the produce down there.”

To keep the season going, they included her husband’s bread on the stand, and Morgan started baking cinnamon rolls and cakes. Everything is organic.

Morgan is also a TikTok influencer, so she has drawn people to the tour from Cleveland, Columbus and northern Indiana.

The group is thinking of doing the trail as a quarterly project, but right now they need to regroup and restock.

For information, visit Facebook and do a search for Roadside Stand Trail.