About Sunflower Sundries

Sunflower Sundries is a small family business built from the passion and vision of Jennifer Gleason. Started in 1992 with the idea of “Local Food for Local Folks,” Sunflower Sundries is a local cottage industry that employs family, friends, and neighbors.

 

Sunflower Sundries is a diversified organic farm with a global, sustainable philosophy, using only locally grown fruits and vegetables. All crops are grown using no chemical farming methods that employ cover crops, crop rotation, composting, habitat biodiversity, minerals, seed saving, mulching, and low tillage. Singing the song of local economy, local foods, and seasonal eating from the beginning, the mission at Sunflower Sundries is not a fad, it is a way of life, from the farm, to your table.

 

Sunflower Sundries grew out of Jennifer Gleason’s personal history of making gifts by hand since childhood. As she experimented with soap, jam, mustard, and pickles as gifts, it became clear that many family and friends did not want to wait until the next Christmas or birthday to get more of her fine products! So she turned their desire, and her life passion, into a small farm business that creates these products on a larger scale.

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Everything we grow, we turn in to a finished product. Fruits into jams, vegetables into pickles, corn into grits, hominy and chips. We grow rhubarb, asparagus, gooseberries, wild blackberries, okra, garlic, horseradish, herbs, flowers, and sunflowers! What we don't grow ourselves, we buy from other local farmers. At present we buy from ten farmers.  

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We have a commercial kitchen in our 1870s farmhouse where we make all the food products. There is a Soap Shop where we have a small retail store in the same building where we make the 1500 bar batches of soap. We added a Corn House several years ago, where we mill the corn, and store the chips and hominy. We have acres of woods and open land with trails for walking and meditating.

 

Today Sunflower Sundries sells products across the USA both retail and wholesale. The business has grown steadily over the past 27 years and its traditional high quality products: herbal soaps, fruit jams, coarse-grain mustards, pickled asparagus, and heirloom corn, are all still handmade by Jennifer and friends, using the same recipes she started with, and only the best local fruits and vegetables.