Chip A.
Yelp
The little farm store that has a little of everything!
Love this place. It's quite small and probably not for those expecting a sit down meal with folded napkins. It's a bakery, it's a cheese shop, a yarn store, it's this and that and all sorts of things.
Nezinscot Farm is a working Organic Dairy farm, and their milk is sold to Organic Valley. It's a small farm, mostly run by Gloria Varney, her husband, and their five children of various ages. Occasionally the Bates College students will come and do an internship there, so there's always changing faces on the farm grounds. Gloria puts her heart and soul into her farm store, waking early to bake an entire wall of delicious breads, half of which were baked in her wood fired oven, fresh cookies, the (omg tastes like homemade) doughnuts, pastries, you name it. Pretty much anything you ate in that store, was likely made by Gloria herself. She's always tinkering with recipes, trying to find something that just inspires. Buy a wheel of the Camembert cheese and her homemade crackers, I swear to god you're going to love it.
As a working farm, this farm is not a petting zoo. It does not have an area for small children to pet ponies or feed pellets to chickens. The 250 acres of pasture is used for everything from rearing free range pasture pork, the dairy cows, free range broiler chickens, turkeys, dairy goats, sheep, and anything else that comes to Glorias mind.
Check out the upstairs area of the Farm Store. It's a little nook of warm cozy quiet full of yarns, spinning and weaving supplies, sheep skin rugs, and a few antiques.
I highly recommend the cookies; dense, lightly sweet, and just the right amount of tenderness to dunk in the coffee (which by the way, is also very, very good)
There is a pizza buffet every few Saturdays, with a bowl to plop down a suggested amount of money to help yourself to hot drinks if you like, all the pizza you can eat, and whatever Gloria harvested that day. It's a great little community atmosphere, where the same people come time and time again, bring instruments to play music, and occasionally bring a salad or brownies to share with others.
I'll admit that it's not going to be as clean and as organized as you might imagine it to be, like I mentioned, it's 85% working farm, and about 15% of Farm Store. You'll see Gloria with her notorious headscarf and rubber boots go whisking through as she goes on another mission to can more vegetables, sample the just cut prosciutto after it had aged on the farm for over a year, or back into the cheese room where she laboriously stirs that mornings milk into silken curds, Come for the atmosphere, enjoy the amazing views from the porch as you sit in a rocker and watch the goats graze across the street.