A Veritable Feast of Roadside Attractions : Weird and Wonderful Produce

One sells ostrich eggs while another tantalizes passers-by with live Maine lobster.

One hawks gourmet vegetables to the rich and famous throughout Southern California, while another practically gives away whatever produce its owner, a happy retiree, feels like picking that day--if he feels like picking at all.

Still another offers to repair your shoes while you browse among the fruit.

From the sublime to the, well, unusual, these are North County’s roadside stands. Where the countryside beckons from ubiquitous orange and green signs. Where freshness can sometimes be measured in hours, not days or weeks. Where you can get to know the people behind the produce.

“I think the roadside stand thing is getting popular because it’s good for both the farmer and the customer,” says Mike Hillebrecht, who, with his sisters and parents, runs and supplies The Farm Stand off San Pasqual Valley Road on the way to the Wild Animal Park.

“Customers get better quality--at least fresher than grocery stores. Plus, people like to get a little drive out in the country. But you gotta sell good stuff or they won’t come back.”

Produce stands run the gamut, from open-air shacks that loyal customers have frequented for decades to corn-filled trucks you flag down. Some stands attract their clientele with exotic arrays of Mother Earth’s bounty. Things like purple “green beans,” golden or striped beets, yellow cherry tomatoes, countless varieties of squash and lettuce and Israeli breakfast melons.

Others rely on good locations, such as the stands on the way to the Wild Animal Park. Echigo Farms, at California 78 and San Pasqual Road, relies on that traffic for its consistent crowds.

Still other stands count on that one scrumptious product to inspire such fierce loyalty among its tasters that they will drive miles to buy it. Every stand wants a customer like Ray Anderson, 60, who drives from Escondido to Fallbrook nearly twice a week. His wife, it seems, has a hankering for strawberries from Uchimura Farms, known as the “Airport Strawberry Stand,” for its proximity to the Fallbrook Airport.

“This is the only place we’ll buy strawberries,” says Anderson, an equipment operator who worked in Fallbrook years ago.

More than anything, freshness is the biggest draw to roadside stands, customers say.

“People like to have fresh vegetables,” says You Young, who helps his father with the family farm in Fallbrook while on summer break from college.

You’s commitment to freshness is so strong that when friends and customers suggested putting a stand in front of their Oriental vegetable farm on Mission Road, he nixed the idea. Instead, he put a sign up notifying customers what produce is available. They drive in, tell You or his father what they want, and wait while the two men pull the vegetables from the ground, wash and bag them.

“If I (put in a stand) and pick it all in the morning, it’s not that fresh,” You says. “So why don’t you come in and wait 15 minutes?”

La Costa resident Tricia Cerda says freshness, whether the produce is picked that moment or that day, makes a world of difference to the taste buds.

“It’s picked when it’s ready to eat, so it tastes so much better,” says Cerda, who stops at Gourmet Gardens in San Marcos whenever she visits a friend in Fallbrook. “In the supermarkets, who knows how long it’s been in storage. With this, you know it’s fresh, and that’s the No. 1 thing.”

Gourmet Gardens picks daily from the family-operated farm directly behind the stand on Sycamore Drive, says Mary Borevitz, who runs the family stand. When they sell out, that’s it for the day.

The Borevitzes don’t sell anything they don’t grow, and that’s the way it’s supposed to work for those with “free farmer” permits from the Consumer Food Protection division of the county Department of Health Services, Environmental Health Services. That’s the designation of most roadside stands, says Tim Tillyer, North County district supervisor. Others buy permits from the county that allow them to sell goods grown by other farmers.

But a number of stands with “free farmer” designation (meaning their permits cost nothing) sell more than their own produce, Tillyer says. The clerk at one stand, for example, boasted about the asparagus from Walla Walla, Wash., while others offer bananas with stickers from Latin America and the like.

“The public health concern is we don’t have an idea of where the produce has come from, and we don’t know who has handled it or how,” Tillyer says.

The produce could come from back yards sprayed with excessive doses of pesticides; it could come from Mexico or Arizona and carry fruit flies; it could have been handled in an unclean way or near sewage.

“It might be good, or it might not be,” he says. “We don’t have a way of knowing. And that’s our biggest problem.”

On their inspection rounds, Tillyer and his inspectors have discovered some of the more unusual offerings at North County’s roadside stands. For example, you’ll find Girl Scout cookies out of season at Valley Produce in the 3400 block of East Valley Parkway.

Perrydise Farms, 1920 S. El Camino Real, used to offer live Maine lobster every weekend to go with its assortment of vegetables and fruits. But proprietor Dave Perry said the arrangement became too burdensome and took away from the farm business.

“We didn’t know what we were doing,” he says. “We’re farmers.”

Once, overestimating his market, he ordered 200 lobsters. Only half of them sold. “We got tired of eating them,” he says. “We had to throw a party just to get rid of them.”

But Perrydise Farms still will special order from Maine for customers who request it.

And if you’re the efficient type who likes one-stop shopping, take a trip to Veltri Shoe Repair and Fruit Stand in Valley Center. You can even get keys made there.

“My dad retired from (the shoe repair business in) Orange County 20 years ago,” says Carmine Veltri. It just so happened that the land onto which he moved his house and all his shoe repair equipment came with 11 acres of orange trees.

“Over 20 years, we’ve planted all kinds of trees. So it basically evolved into a fruit stand.”

The prize for most unusual roadside stand would have to go to the San Diego Ostrich Farm’s stand off San Pasqual Road on the way to the Wild Animal Park. As you drive into the stand, ostriches on either side of the road gather to look at you curiously. Don’t get too friendly with these birds, though. Signs all around warn: “Beware, we bite.”

Inside, you’ll find, among other things, arrays of plain and painted ostrich eggshells. They’re about 7 inches high with exteriors as tough and brittle as ceramic. Owners Margaret and Phil Sargent enjoy plying their customers with fun facts about the huge birds.

For example: one ostrich egg is equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs, though at $30, it costs 10 times as much; an ostrich will lay about 100 eggs a year, with about a 50 % survival rate; males and females take turns sitting on the egg; and, soft boiling one ostrich egg would take an hour, plus you need an ax to open it.

The Sargents also will tell you that before too long, ostrich meat will rival beef. Ostriches, the largest birds in the world, aren’t endangered, and they breed rapidly, Margaret says. The meat is soft, tender and red like a filet, and it’s low in cholesterol and fat. “They’re going to be farmed like cattle,” she predicts.

If you’re not ready for ostrich omelets or bird beef, you can always purchase ostrich plume pens, feather dusters, $300 ostrich skin purses or feather boas.

Then you can wear them to the swankest roadside stand in the county: The Vegetable Shop, known simply as “Chino’s.”

Located in an unassuming mustard-colored shed outside of Rancho Santa Fe (at Via de Santa Fe and Calzada del Bosque), Chino’s has been a household name among the well to do since 1969. On any given morning, a consistent flow of Mercedes, Jaguars and the occasional Rolls Royce line up to select from gourmet vegetables plucked that very morning from the fields beyond the stand.

Like Gourmet Gardens in San Marcos, Chino’s is constantly trying new varieties of vegetables. This year, for example, the farm will produce more than 20 varieties of lettuce. Customers sometimes even bring seeds for the farm to try out. Gil Smith, a 68-year-old designer from Rancho Santa Fe, once brought a seed from a large Italian pepper that he tasted and loved in Italy.

“They do a lot of special stuff once in a while that you can’t find anywhere else,” Smith said.

Restaurants such as the star-studded Spago’s in Los Angeles and others also buy from Chino’s.

Success, however, has forced the family to cut back on some of its intimacy. One Rancho Santa Fe regular remembered a time when he and other longtime customers received a Christmas gift package with homemade jams, pickles and other goodies. There’s just no time for that anymore.

Time is one commodity (Grandpa) Bob Edwards has aplenty. And the 63-year-old proprietor of Grandpa’s Organic Grown roadside stand in Vista is not about to let go of it.

He raises crops on the 2 acres surrounding his Vista home, selling only what he and his wife don’t eat. There’s no telling what you’ll find on any given day. Could be rhubarb, or okra, or lima beans or giant sweet onions.

To “make math easy” and get around the need for a government-certified scale, Edwards packages his vegetables into $1 bags. The bags go out onto a small, shaded cart outside his house on Monte Vista Road. He trusts his customers to abide by the honor system and deposit their money into the slot marked “Pay here. Thanks.”

Meanwhile, Edwards enjoys his retirement from a tattered chair in his cluttered garage within eyesight of the stand.

“I put it out when I feel like it, and I take it in when I feel like it,” says Edwards, who sports ragged red suspenders and a belt with a huge buckle made of buffalo nickels. “Sometimes I leave it out all night when I forget.”

Those nights are the only times Edwards has been stiffed. Of course, he does get a few IOUs and other strange forms of payment. Like food stamps, or the note last year from someone who signed “Love, Stacey.”

“Here is 5,000 pesos,” Edwards reads from the note, which he has tacked to the bulletin board in his garage. “It’s all that I have, but it’s worth a little over $2.50 in American dollars. Here is also a cartoon for your refrigerator. Thank you!” Business certainly isn’t brisk at Grandpa’s Organic Grown. Nor is it at the majority of North County vegetable stands. Edwards has pondered the reasons and thinks he knows why more people don’t take advantage of the freshness available at stands.

“The pace is too fast,” he says. “It’s more convenient to go to a (grocery store) produce counter. This is a little more trouble for some to drive around and get what they’re after.”

But if freshness, down-home hospitality and perhaps a drive in the country is what you’re after, North County’s roadside stands are waiting for you.