There’s no place quite like North Creek Farm. Where else would you find a horticultural nursery, grocery, gift shop, farm stand, cafe, ice cream shop and farm supply store all wrapped into one package? Where else could you find silk scarves created in Maine, and jewelry, clothing and accessories from Guatemala side by side with seaweed fertilizer and colorful Franchi Sementi Italian seeds, chutneys and Thai fish sauce, natural beef and chicken raised on a small farm, locally made cheeses and unusual libations like Old Speckled Hen and Smutty Nose Ales, Black Fly Stout and Czech Pilsner Urguell plus staples like pancake mixes, canned tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, milk and cream? And, where else would you find owners who enjoy chatting about boatbuilding, gardening techniques, recipes for odd veggies, wild and domestic animals and an endless assortment of other topics, politics included?
In the fall of 1996, owners Suzy Verrier and Kai Jacob moved to the circa 1850s farm, located in Phippsburg at the intersection of Routes 209 and 217, 12 miles from Bath. They envisioned simply running a nursery and farm stand, although with them, nothing is ever simple, really, as both have a magnetic attraction to the eclectic and unusual. The nursery would contain a wide assortment of antique and hard-to-find roses collected by Susie during the years she ran Forevergreen Farm in North Yarmouth. It would also feature unusual perennials and annuals in addition to lesser known varieties of vegetables.
Soon they realized that the nearby West Point General Store, which carried grocery staples and fishing gear and sometimes closed during the winter, was the only store on the lower Phippsburg peninsula. “We went right out and bought a freezer,” Suzy says. They stocked it with her frozen soups, sourdough bread, organic vegetables and other groceries. The second year, they added items like their own goat cheese, pancake mixes, and some canned goods, most organic. The West Point Store has since closed, and now Suzy and Kai’s “gourmet Mom and Pop store” is the only year-round source for food, gifts and groceries on the lower peninsula besides the seasonal Percy’s General Store at Popham.
Their mix of merchandise aims to please a diverse clientele, including summer residents from Small Point, many from urban areas; campers from Hermit Island, tourists on their way to Popham Beach, year-round residents from away and long-time Phippsburg residents. Other customers buy through mail order from a newsletter Suzy publishes. Along with description of seeds and plants (emphasizing rugosa roses, the farm specialty), the Spring/Summer 2004 newsletter includes a description of the qualities of the past season’s favorite plants; a recipe for parsley pesto, an explanation of the genesis of a 30-foot wide and several feet high squash mound on the farm; and several columns devoted to humanitarian relocation of tomato hornworms so they can develop into valuable pollinating sphinx moths.
Both Suzy and Kai came to North Creek with a formidable array of skills and experience gleaned over years spent at varied jobs and creative enterprises. Susie tends to be the driving force, always full of energy and new ideas; Kai is more methodical as he creates and maintains the necessary infrastructure to support her plans: set up a heating system, figure out back-up power in case electricity is down; create the duck pond, install the signs, add shelves, build new greenhouses, make trellises and fences and take care of a million other details.
When they moved to the farm, they hired Sylvanus Polky of Brunswick to dig new flower and vegetable beds with his small tractor. They brought in many plants from Susie’s home on Munjoy Hill, where she had replanted all she could salvage after a divorce and giving up her North Yarmouth nursery. “Kai moved them with his Tercel and a trailer,” she says, laughing as she describes his car and trailer wobbling on the Interstate. “The loads were so big nobody would come near him on the highway,” she says. “We were moving tons of plants.” Before winter set in, they had settled the plants in a new greenhouse or outdoors. The following spring, they planted vegetable gardens with unusual and hard-to-find varieties. (This year, they included 11 varieties of beans, numerous types of squash and pumpkins, plus red, orange, pink and white carrots.)
In just three years, the farmhouse was surrounded with a splendid array of shrubs and ornamental and cutting flower beds and large vegetable gardens that stretch towards Totman Cove, visible in the distance to the south. Visitors often spend hours wandering among them, sharing space with three sociable West Highland Terriers, two cats and the chickens that dart from plant to plant.
When the West Point Store closed for the winter three years ago, employees at nearby Sebasco Harbor Resort, who had often bought lunch at the store, asked Susie to offer soups and sandwiches. Although she is an experienced cook, she wasn’t sure she wanted to expand into food preparation, too.
Her culinary talents were nurtured early in life when she was designated head dishwasher for her father, a Frenchman who she describes as a “marvelous cook.” “Being the only girl in the family (she has three older brothers), I was assigned the dishes while he cooked,” she says. “He would read a cookbook the night before and then cook all weekend without ever consulting recipes.” She watched and learned essentials – like how to create a good soup stock and make sauces. From age 15 to 21, when not attending art school at the Philadelphia Museum College and serving an apprenticeship with New York author/illustrator Robert Quackenbush, she cooked at her mother’s restaurant and tea room, the Pocket Watch Shop at Perkins Cove near Ogunquit. ” I was known for my desserts,” she says. She still makes irresistible baked goodies for the North Creek Cafe, along with uniquely seasoned hearty sandwiches and soups. John Gardner, friend and boatbuilder, is the resident pie-maker, using a 45-year old crust recipe from Suzy’s mother’s housekeeper.
When she left the tearoom at age 21, Suzy headed for New York City. “I swore I would never cook in a restaurant again,” she says. In New York, her experience helping her mother buy for and run a gift shop in addition to the work in the tearoom landed her a job at Henri Bendel, an upscale small department store.
Three years later, she was ready to change careers, and walked into Doubleday Publishing House with her portfolio. They immediately hired her as a freelance illustrator, a job that led to publication of several children’s books with her illustrations plus her own “Titus Tidewater,” a story about a lobster that she wrote and illustrated. It will soon be re-published by Island Port Press of Yarmouth, Maine.
When Doubleday reorganized after five years and her editor left, she left, too, and with her husband and daughter, came to Maine to farm for the next 13 years in North Yarmouth. They started small and graduated to 65 acres. “We had it all,” she says: “horses, cows, chickens, goats.” She ran a primarily mail order nursery and developed her expertise with rugosa roses. “I’d loved them since childhood – being around them on my mother’s home place in Small Point,” she says. She realized that although rugosas were extremely popular, few people in the Northeast specialized in them. She took up the challenge and published her first book on rugosas, “Rosa Rugosa.” “Rosa Gallica” followed.
Kai, whose German father and mother were gifted artists, grew up in Germany and New Jersey. He took a different direction from his parents, largely, he says, because he spent much of his childhood with his grandfather, a master craftsman who built machines for professors’ research projects in a large university in Germany. Also, he believes having “the good fortune to take shop in fourth grade,” steered him towards building and craftsmanship.
During his youth, he served a three-and-one-half-year apprenticeship at the well-known wooden boat builder, Abeking and Rasmussen Boatyard in Northern Germany. Later, he worked as a landscape architect, and then he studied goldsmithing and designed and created jewelry. When he came to Maine, he designed and made toys (two of his wooden horses are in the yard at North Creek), built playground equipment, worked at the Arundel Shipyard and served as a boatbuilding instructor at the Northeast Apprentice Co-op and for the Salt Institute.
The West Point Store is up for sale, and North Creek’s varied mixture remains the only resource on the lower peninsula. It is not only the groceries and all other items that keeps people coming back. A cartoon brought in by a customer epitomizes the additional attraction. “It shows a car traveling a country road, approaching a sign that says “Lonely? Chatty couple and Cherry Pie 2 miles.”
North Creek Farm can be reached at 207-389-1341, or northcreek@suscom-maine.net. Hours posted on the front door: “9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., 400 days a year.”