Building the Little White Farmstand

The story behind building myself a little farmstand for next to nothing, and one year later!

I built our farmstand last year on a little bit of a whim. It was already early July, and the thought had not even crossed my mind earlier in the season. Every year I've kept adding to

our gardens, and every year is the biggest growing season we've ever had LOL. I preserve the majority of what I grow, but I wanted to be able to sell off a bit of our produce, even just to pay for my seeds and soil amendments each spring.

We love our neighbors, and they all highly support what we're doing. They are our best customers! I had my neighbors popping over weekly to buy eggs from us, and although I enjoy chatting with everyone regularly, I did feel bad when they popped by for eggs to find that we weren't home.

With these thoughts in my mind, I came up with the idea of building a self serve farm stand. I can put out what I have, and customers can grab what they want from the end of our laneway anytime through the day!

Because it was pretty much the middle of summer already, if I did this, I could not spend a lot of money. We had already maxed out our budget for outdoor projects for the season. But - we are very good at scooping up free and thrown away materials throughout the year (even if it requires a bit of extra work, and even if we don't need it at the time), we put the items in storage for future use. So, I took to the rafter in the garage to start digging.

My parents had taken down a wall in their house and gave us all the 2x4s - they were all different sizes and we had to remove all the nails, but the wood was still in good shape. My husband had also brought home a few sheets of plywood from a job site he worked at; the edges were all damaged, and they were being thrown away. I still needed some wood for the sides and couldn't find anything else, so we picked up a few free wooden skids to tear down (a pain in the ass, but it's free!) The paint and construction screws we had leftover from other projects. The only item I had to purchase to get going was a secure cashbox with a lock.

I don't have plans for the stand; I just kind of built what I could with the material I had. I wanted to make the bottom large and deep enough to house a cooler and be able to have a bit of space behind that for produce items and flowers. It took me about a week to complete while working on it during my son's naps.

Today, the farmstand is open daily, still selling eggs, produce, and flowers when in season. So far, people seem to love it! This year, I have added sourdough bread, tallow products, and hopefully honey later this year. I even added a pair of hinged doors to close and lock everything up at night.

There are definitely things I would have done differently when building this, for sure. Like making it bigger! But I had limited materials, and this design works just fine for now :)

What do you think of my little scrap wood farmstand? What would you have done differently?

Thanks for stopping by!