New farmstand offers sustainable home products

 

by Trisha Ingalls

BRIGHTON – Just outside of Island Pond there’s a new farmstand offering more than traditional farm products.  Krystie Wood, owner of By the Bay Farm, said she is excited for the grand opening of her new stand on June 10.

Ms. Wood, who is originally from Rutland, lived near Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, for ten years before she moved to Island Pond a year and a half ago with her husband and two kids. “I love it up here,” she said.  She and her family are transforming the camp they bought into a house, so with her business and kids and starting a farm, life has been very busy.

She has been doing this work for about ten years now, having started making natural products around the time she was pregnant with her daughter. “I started learning the horrible things in our products,” Ms. Wood recalls, “and I just wanted to have a more natural way of living.  We did the whole cloth diaper and homemade baby wipes thing.  And it just kept going, and it turned into soap and other bath products and I make my own laundry detergent and dish soap; you name it, I make it.”

She carries products for men, too, and has some things for Father’s Day in the farmstand, like shaving soap and beard wax.  Ms. Wood’s farmstand carries CBD products, as well, for those who want them.  She has plenty of soap, and also bath salts, shower steamers, gummies, an elderberry syrup kit, lip balm, candles, soy wax melts, and more.  Her favorite thing to make is still soap, because it lets her be more artistic and play around with things, versus the strict recipes involved in the other products she makes.

A friend of hers makes cloth baby wipes, and that friend’s sister makes wallets from 40 percent recycled materials, and wool dryer balls.  “I try to fill in all the different odds and ends that I don’t make,” she said, but those products fill in the sustainability of a healthy home.  She has an online store and several wholesalers who carry her products down south, and she goes south for farmers’ markets and events.

Ms. Wood carries a variety of products made by others.  For example, she has an assortment of pottery made by North Country Union High School students, and 100 percent of proceeds from the sale of student pottery goes to their scholarship fund.  Ms. Wood said she met a woman from Massachusetts who lives in Newport and has a pottery studio, who connected her to the art teacher at the high school, and the partnership was born.

The Wood family can’t put in a garden this year because they are getting a new septic system installed, which could damage the garden.  Instead, Devaney farm on Sanderson Hill in West Charleston will be supplying produce this summer while Ms. Wood gets her garden up and running.  She will be selling her own duck eggs, and rabbits. She said rabbit manure is great for making homemade liquid fertilizer, and she sells the bunnies, as well — pedigreed white New Zealand bunnies.  She has started to keep bees, so she will sell her own honey by the end of the year.

Her husband is in the process of building her some outdoor shelving where she will put plants and flowers for sale, and she’s looking for someone who builds birdhouses to round out the outdoor sales space.  Ms. Wood had a “soft opening” to work out the kinks, but the official grand opening is June 10, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at 1851 East Brighton Road in Island Pond.  The flyer for the event teases “giveaways,” and cautions that parking may be limited.