Drive U.S. Highway 98 just south of Fairhope in late May and you will pass one of Baldwin County’s most reliable signs of summer: McKenzie Farm Market, run by Melanie McKenzie on property her family has farmed for about 75 years. Behind the stand are her brothers Tommy and Mike McKenzie, third-generation Baldwin County farmers whose children, the fourth generation, are already hard at work in the fields.
Stop by and chances are good you will meet a McKenzie, because the family has never handed the place off to strangers. The market began as an open produce stand on the side of the road, where the McKenzies’ mother worked through the summer heat, long before the family built the bigger, enclosed structure Melanie now oversees. The corn today stands waist-high where a few weeks ago only stalks emerged from the ground, and the season is close at hand.
Silver King, Sweet Corn’s Late King
The question every customer asks this time of year is when the corn will be ready, and which variety the family is growing. Last year it was a mix of yellow and white corn. This year the fields are planted in Silver King, a favorite among Baldwin County sweet corn lovers, a white sweet corn prized for its tenderness and sugar content. Modern sweet corn hybrids like this one typically produce about two ears per stalk, though experienced farmers know the caveat: crowding the stalks too close together limits you to one mature ear. Spacing, as Tommy McKenzie will tell you, is part of the harvest.
The corn and tomatoes will be ready about the first of June, and the cantaloupe and watermelons follow by mid-to-late June. That rhythm, when the first Silver King comes in around the same time the first Gulf beach days do, is what the market’s calendar is built around.
From the Field to the Kitchen Door
McKenzie Farms grows most of what the market sells, with surplus produce headed to local grocery stores, and what the family does not grow is sourced locally when possible. One example is the hydroponically grown lettuce from Local Appetite Growers in Silverhill, a nearby operation whose greenhouse lettuces let the market stock salad greens that never see a long-distance truck.
The market’s wholesale relationships run deep into the local food scene. Punta Clara Kitchen in Point Clear, the beloved candy kitchen famous for its pickled figs and preserves, buys squash and cucumbers, “anything that can be pickled,” Tommy says. A handful of Fairhope restaurants count on McKenzie produce too, including Bay Breeze Café, Red or White, and Saraceno’s Restaurant. The family picks produce every other day, which is about as farm-to-table as supply chains get.
More Than Vegetables
Regulars know the market has grown into something of a general store for the Gulf Coast table. Alongside the seasonal produce, the family offers specialty items: Cajun stuffed chickens, steaks and ground beef from Lillian Cattle Company, and cakes from a baker in Andalusia, the kind of dependable dessert stop that turns a produce run into a week’s worth of eating.
The McKenzies are also plugged into the wider movement behind Alabama-grown food. Tommy recently sat at a dinner party where every dish on the table was grown and raised by local Alabama farmers, an event hosted by Sweet Grown Alabama, the non-profit foundation that connects retailers and consumers with the state’s farmers and agricultural products. Its tagline, “You can taste the difference,” is aimed at exactly the kind of shoppers who have made Baldwin County’s farm markets boom in recent years, as more families look for food they can trace to a field they can drive past.
The Season Ahead
Baldwin County has farmed sweet corn for generations, and its sandy loam soils and warm nights put some of the state’s first sweet corn on tables each June. What has changed is how much of it moves through markets like the McKenzies’, where the person handing you the corn is likely related to the person who grew it, and where the fourth generation is already learning the difference between a stalk with two ears and a stalk crowded down to one.
So watch the calendar: corn and tomatoes around June 1, cantaloupe and watermelons by mid-to-late June, hydroponic lettuce and the specialty counter all season long. And when you ask how many ears a Silver King stalk will give you, expect the farmer’s answer, delivered with a grin: two, if you give them room.