Dylan And Caroline Wallace Open "The Little Farm Store" On West Creek Road

Dylan and Caroline Wallace’s Eat Fire Farm was already bringing a wide array of locally produced goods to Nantucket: pasture-raised pork, harvest sea salt from island waters, honey, cut flowers, dried herbs, bay scallops, and perennial produce. This week, they brought all of those passions together under one roof on West Creek Road with the opening of their new venture, “The Little Farm Store.”

The Wallaces have completely reimagined the small mid-island storefront that was previously home to The Green, and have just celebrated the opening of what they envision as a collaborative showcase of local produce and goods from their farm and others around Nantucket. They are partnering with chef Colin Coyle’s Bliss Nantucket, which will share half of The Little Farm Store and offer coffee, fresh juices, smoothies, and chef-crafted healthy meals.

“This opportunity came to us this winter, it's not something we were expecting to do, but it's something that we've been dreaming about,” Dylan Wallace said Wednesday inside The Little Farm Store, just hours before its ribbon-cutting ceremony with the Chamber of Commerce. “And we've been kind of laying the groundwork with getting a license to sell the pork and a license to sell the scallops. We have a wholesale license for selling our sea salt, everything that we make on-island. And then this just gives us an opportunity to sell it directly to the consumer. The wholesale is great, but it's hard to maintain your identity in those spaces, and also it's really hard as a farmer with margins, and any business person on Nantucket, to give up 30 percent or 40 percent when you're selling wholesale.”

The Wallaces are leasing the building from the Reinemo family and have made significant investments in the building’s kitchen and basement infrastructure to make The Little Farm Store a success.

For years, the Wallaces had been growing at the Land Bank’s Mt. Vernon Farm fields off Hummock Pond Road, and selling goods at Sustainable Nantucket’s farm stand at the property. That will continue, but the new Little Farm Store will provide them with a brick-and-mortar location, centrally located in the mid-island area. While the Wallaces spoke about Eat Fire Farm’s own locally produced goods, they kept returning to the idea of collaborating with other island farms in the new space.

“We're trying to support other local farms, so having another space, other than the farm stand at 168 (Hummock Pond Road), for those farmers to sell their produce,” said Dylan Wallace, who was born and raised on the island. “We started stocking Washashore Farm’s produce, and we've offered the space to Fog Town Farm and Sea Legs. We're setting up a wholesale account with Bartlett’s Farm, and we're going to reach out to Moor’s End, so we want to have Bartlett’s Farm tomatoes and Moor’s End corn. It feels right in this location, in this mid-island space. You don't have to go into town, you don't have to go out to Cisco.”

“It's flowers, it's our pork, our sea salt, and as much produce as we can get locally,” Caroline Wallace said. “We’re just really excited to have a space where we can collect as much of the island together in one spot, because we all rely on each other. So it's important that we all work together, and that we all support each other.”

Last year, Eat Fire Farm brought seven American guinea hogs to market. This year, they are aiming for 12. Five of the pigs are now grazing at the Land Bank’s property on New Lane, where they are assisting with land management, clearing invasive species like honeysuckle, velvet grass, and bittersweet. Three more are at the Eat Fire Farm plot off Hummock Pond Road, and another four are at the Wallaces’ home. Eventually, they will all be processed at a facility in Westport, and the Wallaces will return to the island with hundreds of pounds of pork cuts, including chops, steaks, roasts, ground pork, sausage, bacon, ribs, and belly.

“So they’re all local pigs - they’re pigs with a purpose,” Dylan Wallace said. “They’re maintaining invasive species, they’re prepping ground for our vegetable and flower production, and then this is the bonus. We’re bringing them here, and we’re able to sell them directly to consumers, and selling some of them to restaurants.”

The Little Farm Store customers will also find frozen Nantucket bay scallops that Dylan Wallace dredged over the winter. The packages feature a label designed by Caroline with Dylan’s sketch of Old North Wharf and the Andrews’ shanty, where he opens scallops during the commercial season.

“We froze the last week’s worth of our catch, so we have about 400 pounds in the freezer at The Hive, which is where we have our wholesale license,” Wallace said. “So we are processing and storing and packaging them there, for sale here.”

Once the Little Farm Store gets through its initial few months of operations, the Wallaces envision the business running on its own in the fall.

“We want to be here to educate people and kind of tell them what's going on, but we're hoping as the season slows down, we can open it up like 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. as self-serve and have that honor system like it is out of the farm stand,” Wallace said.