From farm to plate

A set of four tiny legs walks by in the morning sun, footing unsteady, knees wobbling.

The tiny lamb is just a few hours old; the only thing it knows is its mother’s milk, the quiet patter of hooves in the barn and pasture, and the soft, caring voice of a farmer.

A Maremma sheepdog named Quaker blends in with the herd, quietly watching for predators she can scare off — most of her work is done at night — and rolling over in the grass as if asking for a belly rub.

Chickens cluck and peck the ground around a patch of blooming yellow daffodils, and Fergus the border collie lies just outside the fence, gnawing on a tennis ball until the time comes to usher the animals back into the barn for their slumber.

As Sterling, a 6-year-old ram, stands watch over his ewes — many of them in heat and preparing for the next generation — Bambi Freeman, 79, walks among her flock, canes in hand, back slightly bent, assessing each critter.

Many will be ready for market this summer, providing local residents with wool products, pelts, eggs or fresh meat.

If you shop at the Stowe Farmers Market, which is opening for the season this Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., rain or shine, Sterling Brook Farm is one of the places from which your food and fabrics will come.

Sheep farming

Freeman has been a sheep farmer on Sterling Brook Farm in Stowe since the 1970s, when she and her husband discovered an abandoned farmhouse and barn on Sterling Valley Road and bought the land before developers could take over.

Freeman was trained as a lab technician but grew tired of looking at bugs under a microscope, and late in life decided that she was an outdoor person.

She and her husband at the time started with 160 breeding ewes and were producing 300 lambs a year — monopolizing the mutton market in Stowe.

Their children worked the farm, Freeman tended to the animals and her husband maintained the equipment and hayed the land, until their divorce.

After the separation, Freeman kept the farm.

She and her family sold their lamb, fresh eggs from a brood of Golden Comet chickens, and wool products straight from the barn.

Freeman fell ill one year, and sold the flock, but as soon as she recovered — missing all the animals running around her 23 acres — she brought back a more manageable mob of sheep, with 25 to 30 ewes and a single ram.

Since September, those girls have birthed 30 lambs, which Freeman raises for eight months before ushering them off to Brault’s Meat Market & Slaughterhouse in Troy to be butchered.

There, the lambs become sausage, or the meat is cut into chops or legs, or packaged in chunks for kabobs.

To make more money, Freeman raises a few of the rams for a bit longer, and then sells them off, live, to other farms to breed.

Then she buys the lambs back after birth and raises some of them to replace the aging ewes in her flock, ensuring that her ram isn’t breeding with his children. She butchers the rest.

“I don’t really believe in line breeding,” Freeman said. “And pretty much all of the lambs in the area now came from my flock,” so she knows the quality of the product she sells.

About a decade after starting to sell her products straight from the farm, she decided that arrangement wasn’t working. It required her to be there all the time, and opening a store wouldn’t work for the same reason.

So, she got together with a few other local farmers, including Adam Berg and Elizabeth Squier, to open an outdoor summer market.

For Freeman, the Stowe Farmers Market is about providing people with products from their neighbors, and socializing.

“The market is my social life. If I didn’t have the farmers market, I’d be a hermit up here on my farm,” she said.

The market started with mostly vegetables, but as farmers have come and gone over the years, it has diversified. While the products have changed, the location and many of the vendors have remained the same.

“I think it’s actually better since some of the farms went out, because we have more variety,” Freemen said. Instead of just produce and local meat, “we have cheese, bread, barbecue, pizza, ice cream and flowers. We all sell different things, but if there are a few vendors with the same products, we do better. It draws more people, especially if one vendor runs out.”

Alongside her lamb, Freeman sells spun wool yarn, wool and Carhartt dog beds, Green Mountain Blankets — soon to be called Vermont Blankets, as a friend passed on the name to her after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s — and skins off the sheep, a byproduct of her meat.

She doesn't sell eggs at the market, because many other vendors sell fresh eggs, but she does still sell them right at the farm.

“I don’t waste anything,” Freeman said. And everything is kept local.

Her dog beds are sewn together by a local seamstress, wool yarn is processed at Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, and meat is processed in Troy.

Other vendors

The Stowe Farmers Market will be 10 vendors larger this year, according to Heather Mallory, president of the market’s board, with 50 farms or local businesses hawking their wares.

Mallory will be one of those vendors for the 20th year running. Her business, Green Seed Herbals, sells everything from handmade, organic medical salves to insect repellent.

“I think farmers markets are one of the best ways to promote small businesses,” Mallory said. “They allow you to be an active member in your community. They help build relationships and engagement with your customer base. I love being outside. I love seeing and talking to my friends and customers year after year. It is truly what motivates me. It has become my extended Vermont family.”

Mallory and her boyfriend moved to Stowe in June 1998 and instantly fell in love with the Stowe Farmers Market. She realized it would be an excellent outlet to sell her products, made from her own herbs, as well as herbs from other farms in the area. Mallory doesn’t have a greenhouse at her home in Hyde Park, and can’t grow enough on her woodland property.

“I do have several perennials gardens and one small production medicinal herb garden,” Mallory said. “I grow echinacea, comfrey, garlic, calendula, arnica, elecampane, thyme, horehound and lavender. I grow many other medicinal herbs but these are the ones I currently use in abundance in my recipes.”

She also wild-crafts red clover, plantain, yarrow and St. John’s wort.

Joining her are vendors of everything from beef and pork to pottery and jewelry.

For a full list of vendors, stop by the market on Mountain Road in Stowe, near the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe, or visit stowefarmersmarket.com.